


Other Futures Than These

by midrashic



Series: A Collection of Invented, Improbable, and Irresistible Futures [1]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Erik Lehnsherr Defense Squad, Getting Back Together, Hurt Erik Lehnsherr, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No Beach Divorce, Time Travel Fix-It, X-Men: Days of Future Past Fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:21:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 26
Words: 80,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22168552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: In which Cuba doesn't break them apart, but that doesn't mean that their futures are tied together. (Except that it does.)A Days of Future Past AU where only one person can defeat the Sentinels and save the future: the man whose imprisonment and torture created them, and Charles Xavier's ex.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr/Older Charles Xavier, Jean Grey & Erik Lehnsherr
Series: A Collection of Invented, Improbable, and Irresistible Futures [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069736
Comments: 496
Kudos: 362





	1. 1962-3: One Good Thing

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1962.

He almost said it, too.

Standing there, on the beach, sand digging uncomfortably into the places where Hank had reinforced against sharp edges and G-forces but not, apparently, against clinging and itching, he’d looked up at Erik, cold and remote, the missiles poised in the air, and he’d almost said— _They’re just following orders._

He’d been frightened, then. Terrified of losing Erik, terrified _for_ Erik, for what this—murder on this vast a scale, this indiscriminately—would mean for his soul. Terrified, too, for everyone there on the beach with them, what an attack like this might signal to the humans, who were just as scared as he was, but for different reasons, he could feel it screaming out at him even from miles away, their fear, like a beacon, like colors flying high.

It was Erik he couldn’t feel. Where Shaw had felt like a black hole, drawing energy and life wherever he went, Erik felt like—like a corpse. Like he’d already lost him.

He hadn’t. But he would, he knew, in the moment before he opened his mouth, if he said that—what he genuinely believed to be true—that this wasn’t _like_ that, Erik, that it wasn’t as though they were aiming those missiles at infants and the infirm the way the Nazis had, that they had no idea what was going on, much less enough information to target and launch a genocidal campaign—he knew, suddenly, with such clarity that for years later he would wonder whether or not he hadn’t manifested a secondary mutation of precognition just for those few seconds, that if he did say the words squirming to be let out of his mouth, that he would lose everything. Everything, everything. Erik and Raven and the children and Moira. The future he and Erik had tentatively begun to map out together, though Erik’s thoughts would always, always return, in the end, even when they were in bed together, even when they were drunk and at their most fanciful, talking about a school, talking about a society, to Shaw. The _person_ he had seen that he was becoming, with Erik’s help, with the children’s help—

So instead, he said, “Erik, please. I love you.”

And Erik—

stopped.

“Please,” he said. All his life, he’d known exactly what to say. Exactly the right words that anyone wanted to hear, when he was talking to someone it was like they were screaming the right answer in his ear, projecting so loudly what they so badly wanted him to say. Except with Raven, sometimes. And except now. Erik’s mind was blank to him, all that beautiful color and geometric order blocked off by a black glass wall, he had no idea if he was getting through; he plumbed down into the depths of himself and threw it all at Erik though he knew he couldn’t hear it, though he know the helmet would stop him from projecting, he opened his mouth and let it all spill out, thoughts and emotions and feelings and words in a blur radiating from him. “Please. Please, Erik, be the man I love. Not the monster you think you are. Not the monster _he_ thought you were. Be Erik. Please, be my Erik.”

Tears had blurred his eyes and he couldn’t see the missiles anymore, couldn’t feel anything except fear, his own and those of everyone else’s on that beach (except Erik’s). He stood there and cried, his heart spilling out through his eyes and his mouth and his mind, not sure whether there was anything left to plead, not sure whether the missiles still hung above him or had flown their deadly course—

—and then Erik’s warm forehead pressed to his, no metal between them, and he fell headfirst into that mind, that beautifully ordered mind, its color like a mosaic, its strength like steel girders. “It’s okay,” Erik was saying, an answer to a question he hadn’t asked out loud. “It’s okay, it’s okay, _liebling_ , it’s okay.”

Charles sobbed and threw his arms around Erik and he could _feel_ the missiles falling into the ocean, inert, the same way that Erik could. The serenity of belonging to someone, the rage of passion, and in between was love, so much love, enough to turn the tide of battle, enough to control a fleet, and now Erik turned all the ships away, the reaching-out of it easier than it had ever before before. Jubilation flickered around him, and then, farther away, a flash of resolve as Moira lifted the gun—

And then a white line of pain in his spine—

But it was worth it. In the year and a month that followed—the physical therapy that failed to train him to so much twitch a toe, Erik’s searing guilt at every moment and Moira’s heavy blanket of despair as he wiped her mind clean, the children’s pity and their anger and their love, through the preparations they made to get the school up and running and the chess matches and the drinking and the way they learned, again, how to make love—it was worth it.

Not, he thought numbly, sat in front of the TV set as crowds screamed and the President reeled from an impossible shot, that it had made any difference in the end.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	2. 2023, 1968: Back to the Past

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

In the last attack, a Sentinel had driven a metal spike through Scott’s visor and into his skull. He’d survived—barely—but it had been worth it, because he’d given Beast and Forge enough time to painstakingly move the machine they’d cobbled together with bits of discarded technology, human and mutant, left behind and abandoned and generally made useless by electric power going the way of the dinosaurs. It was Jean who had said, sharp as jagged glass, that they couldn’t wait for Scott to be better, even though Beast had offered, even though Forge had already turned away in disappointment. So Jean and Scott said their goodbyes in the makeshift infirmary that Blink, who, in another lifetime had been a nurse, had set up in their new hideout, and Jean didn’t look back as she walked away from Scott’s bedside and down the twisting, candlelit passages of the abandoned military base they’d re-appropriated. Even with her telepathy stunted as it was, she could feel him watching her with his one good eye, the other bandaged over to conceal the way in which the Sentinel spike had cleanly taken out the other and fractured his skull so that a single use of his own powers might blow his head apart.

As she walked down to the workshop, the others came to pay their respects. To her, or to their world—which, if she got just lucky enough, would never have existed—she wasn’t sure. To her sacrifice, perhaps, in being the only one who would remember the world that had been—if, of course, she was lucky. Rogue, pale and quiet as she’d been since three attacks ago, when they’d lost Kitty (she imagined a world in which she didn’t measure time by Sentinel attacks), slipped in and out of shadow, green eyes watchfully tracing Jean’s footsteps. Blink, her sleeves rolled up and forearms dyed in blood, paused at the doorway of what passed for a surgical suite nowadays and watched her go by. She could have ‘ported Jean to the workshop in an instant, of course, but seemed to appreciate the others’ need for a spectacle, for a parade. Psylocke saluted her. The youngest ones, the ones who’d survived so far, mostly due to the efforts of Logan and his Laura, that fierce little protector, peeked out from behind elbows and closed doors. They’d heard stories about her, of course. About the X-Men, back when they had been X-Men and not just rats on the run, scratching wildly for their own survival, but also about _her_ specifically. That she’d once had the power to end this all. That the humans had known, and how one of their first moves had been to strip her of it. “A swindle,” Magneto had called it once. Another chess term. She missed him with a fierce, biting ache.

It wasn’t why she’d volunteered, her power loss. In fact, sometimes it was the only bearable thing about this world, that the Phoenix was no longer screaming in her head, that she no longer had to exert fierce control over every increment of her every emotion, because the slightest slip-up might mean the incineration of everything she loved. It made things easier with Scott, who loved her both as the Phoenix and as simply Jean, but who wasn’t _afraid_ of simply Jean the way he had been of the Phoenix. (But these thoughts, when she had them, also felt like a betrayal of the man who had taught her a hard-won control that had become as useless as her own in the face of Sentinels, and who had mourned the loss of his own powers every day until his death. It wasn’t why she’d volunteered, but she missed it—not the power, but the feeling of being unashamedly herself. She suspected it was the same grief she felt for _him.)_

Logan was waiting for her outside the workshop. “Hey, Jeannie,” he said, and kissed her cheek. He didn’t linger with his lips the way he once might have; time and friendship had worn away his passion for her. He lingered, instead, with his hands, the way he seemed reluctant to release his arms from around her, to let her back out into the cold, brutal world. He didn’t ask after Scott. He’d been in the infirmary with him all morning, until Jean had come to say her goodbyes, and he’d be there with him after she’d gone. Protecting him, for her.

Jean breathed. Logan had lost the ever-present scent of cigar smoke long ago, but at times she imagined she could still smell it on him. Softer times. “Let’s go.”

For the last four years, Forge and Beast had been given first choice over where to set up in their various hideouts, with Blink’s infirmary coming in a distant second. This workshop was low-ceilinged—when the wind hammered into the mountainside, the roof scraped against the top of the chamber worryingly—but spacious. Jean stepped over discarded vacuum tubes and pencil stubs, the detritus of the long nights Forge and Beast had spent checking and re-checking every calculation and still not able to come up with a more precise number for when in the timestream their machine would spit her out than “anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred years in the past.” “I’m sorry,” Beast said again, looking even more frazzled than usual. “If we had a better sense of the fault tolerances in the batteries we scavenged…”

“—or if we could remotely predict what the generator surge might look like,” Forge put in. Over the course of this project, they’d started finishing each other’s sentences, which was sweet, but also annoying when they forgot that anyone else was in the room and started speaking to each other in half-thoughts, the other mutant quick enough to catch on in a way that nobody else in the world was.

“Just get me there,” Jean said. “I’ll figure the rest out.”

“I know you will,” Logan said.

The Professor didn’t hug her. He just clasped her hand and made her repeat the speech he’d given her one last time. Then he’d nodded, and when Forge started flicking the switches on, wheeled out of the room.

Before she stepped in the chamber, she took a minute to memorize the future she was hopefully not returning to, if she landed early enough. The time machine was crude-looking, like it had been hacked together from a giant old telephone, the kind with a rotary dial. It was a massive dome made of steel and plastic, with bundles of wires and cables of every type they could salvage running from to a control panel that had been Frankensteined together from an old stove range and literal telephone keypads and—oh, that _was_ a rotary dial. It didn’t exactly inspire confidence, nor did Beast’s anxious face.

“I’ll be fine,” she told him, a hint of fondness creeping into her tone. It had been a long time since she’d had the space to be purely fond of someone.

“I know you will,” he echoed, and opened the door for her like a gentleman.

“Kick ass,” Forge told her.

“Make him proud,” Logan said, and Scott must have told him to say that, because it was exactly what she needed. If she were a different woman, if she were even the woman she had been ten years ago, tears might have risen to her eyes. As it was, she took a deep, steadying breath, stepped into the chamber, and looked up at the way the steel struts crisscrossed each other, supported each other, formed a star with six points. Not quite a Star of David, the points were too narrow, but close. Magneto had once told her that each point represented an attribute of God: loving-kindness, judgment, beauty, glory, connection, endurance. Endurance, she thought, as white light washed over her. Make him proud.

— ⓧ —

1968.

She opened her eyes and she was on a street she recognized. It was the middle of the day; it had been night when she’d made the jump. She’d known it might take a while to get her bearings, but she hadn’t realized how her heart would pound as she looked around for a stray newspaper, a billboard, anything that would place her more firmly in the past than the cars, which were promisingly long, heavy steel sedans. She turned, and turned again, barely seeing the half-finished tire swing she remembered whole and weather-beaten in the Macallisters’ front yard, hardly registering the old red Ford Pinto that had taken her to doctors’ appointments and figure skating practice, and if she just slowed down and _thought_ she could’ve used that to determine a range of years, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t. 60s, 70s, 80s—was she too late? Had she never had a chance after all?

The sound of a door closing behind her, and she turned, and her breath caught.

Her mother, looking just as she remembered her. Just as she had in the few pictures Jean had of her, the ones that the bank had let her keep while they sold off her parents’ belongings. The slight waves Jean had been so envious of as a child, her hair having always been as stick-straight as it was now, though they were tousled, like she’d just rolled out of bed; her lovely square jaw and the green eyes that were like Jean’s, just like Jean’s. Her memories of her father had become tainted over the years, though she’d never seen him again, not before the Sentinels managed to kill him for the crime of being a human capable of passing on an X-gene, not before the Professor, grim and sleepless, had seen his name on the casualty lists and wheeled into her room at the mansion and said, “Jean, there is something you need to know.” But Elaine Grey remained pure and pristine in her memory, and Jean goggled at her, drinking her in, gulping down the sight like a drowning woman. How had she not thought of her mother? How had she not realized that for the first time since she was eight years old, she and her mother might be sharing the same planet?

A puzzle piece fell into place. 1975. She’d made it before 1975.

Her mother—was carrying a child. Flaming red hair, even as a toddler, blinking at her now, green-eyed and innocent, with no idea of the power she would have, no idea of the tragedy she would endure. A baby, but—she’d been born in 1967.

Too late, too late. She’d needed to come out in 1963 or before. Four or five years. She’d missed the vital cut-off line by only four or five years.

Her mother turned, spied her, jumped. Almost on autopilot, Jean glanced down at what she was wearing—still the leather-and-plastic-polymer of 2023, tough enough to block a bullet, not quite tough enough to stop a Sentinel (but nothing was tough enough to stop a Sentinel, they’d pulled Colossus apart by the limbs). She surveyed her gloves, her combat boots, dispassionately, and thought distantly that she probably looked very strange.

“Hello?” her mother called.

“Hello,” Jean said dazedly.

“Are you—all right?”

“I don’t know,” Jean said.

She didn’t answer Elaine’s questions of what she was doing, why she was dressed like that, and then, when her silence continued to bore holes in the air between them, what the last thing she remembered was, when the last time she ate was. Elaine tentatively reached out, guided her inside by the shoulders, and oh, she’d forgotten this, too, her mother’s kindness, the way that, long before the Professor, it had been her mother who taught her that those with the ability to help had the responsibility to help. “I was running out to the store,” Elaine said, sounding a little embarrassed. “We have baby food and Cheerios, and not much else, I’m afraid.” Still, she set a bowl of Cheerios in front of Jean, and Jean slurped politely and then ravenously as the taste of highly-processed sugar hit her tongue. She hadn’t had cereal in years, once the last scavenging ran out. They mostly lived off of game Logan caught and canned foods now. Elaine watched with faint alarm as she chewed grimly through one bowl and then another, savoring the high-fructose corn syrup that, more than anything, convinced her that it had worked, that she was in the past, surrounded by a peace that was only sustainable because humanity as a whole wasn’t aware of the existence of mutants.

The house echoed with her baby self’s babbles; her father was probably at work, she thought. This was the era of the stay-at-home mother, probably a few years before the Equal Rights Amendment, which she remembered vaguely as a child of five or six. “I’m Elaine,” her mother said.

 _I know_ , she didn’t say. _I was named after you, my middle name your first. You protested, but Dad said that he didn’t have any female role models growing up, and I could do a lot worse than you for mine. “_ …Charlotte,” she said, because she couldn’t very well say, “I’m Jean Grey, what a coincidence, that’s your daughter’s name, too?”

Elaine smiled at her, and made baby Jean wave. Jean wanted to cry. “This is Jean.”

“How old is she?” she said softly.

“A little over a year.”

So, 1968. The summer, probably; she’d been born in May, just as spring set itself on fire and turned to hazy heat. Jean swallowed. Five years—she’d missed it by five measly years—but fine. Fine, Plan B. This was why there _was_ a Plan B. She couldn’t give the mutants she’d left behind the gift of a world without Sentinels, but she could find the one mutant who could turn the tide of the war that at this point was more like a series of massacres, who could buy them the safety they needed to carve out a _new_ world for themselves, one in which mutants and their human allies could build something enduring, not be constantly running for their lives.

She could linger here, she knew. She could wait until her father came home and soak up the memories of when he’d loved her, before he’d left her in the care of the school with strict instructions that she never know what he’d done, how he’d abandoned her. She could watch them, beautiful and young, parents sparkling with the joy of new life in their arms, and get lost in this spell, forget that she was no longer that child, her mutation indistinguishable from their humanity at this moment. That she had responsibilities and people she loved and people she’d lost to do right by.

Who was she kidding—she’d never had any choice at all.

The kick of having powers of resurrection was that you spent more time than you should thinking about the dead. What you owed them. What you wanted for them.

“Elaine,” she said, “this is going to sound strange, but I need to borrow some clothes.”

— ⓧ —

Clad in her mother’s blouse and an old pair of jeans, she looked terribly… human, a word she hadn’t used to describe herself in years. With the ten dollar bill Elaine had silently pressed into her hand, she climbed onto the bus from Ithaca, New York, to Westchester County and resolutely didn’t look back. She spent the three-hour ride with her face pressed against the glass, soaking in the lush beauty of civilization that hadn’t been blasted to ruin. Most of the humans—purged of the X-gene carriers as they were, tested at birth and after any industrial or nuclear accident that might result in mutation—lived in walled cities built over the skeletons of what had once been thriving metropolises, police states in miniatures. Mutants, of course, had not even that. She’d left the Professor and all her friends in the ruins of a military base built into the Canadian Rockies, not terribly far in either geography of aesthetic from Alkali Lake. Mutation, of course, was less common now that it had been during the early twenty-first century, that heyday of genetic diversity before the Sentinels had taken control. She whipped past playgrounds with children swinging and little girls skinning their knees and little boys in sandboxes and saw not one physical mutation among them; those children would have been locked away, hidden in high-end hospitals or basement bedrooms. Still, it was hard to see all the _life_ out there and not get choked up.

This. This was what they were fighting for. Maybe she hadn’t come back early enough to stop the Sentinels from ever being created, but if they could just shut down the program, find a way to turn the Sentinels _off_ , they could rise again. A society of mutants, isolated and persecuted, but they’d survived that before. They could rebuild.

She just needed to convince a few people of her perspective first.

At the end of the road she walked to the mansion, shuddering at the way that when everything else felt vibrant and full of unfamiliar life, the overgrown lawns and rusting school plaque had turned the old place into a graveyard she’d never seen before. Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters had either been brimming with youth and vitality or a fire-eaten husk after the government had gotten done with it. This in-between, of a place slowly going to seed, rattled her almost as much as seeing her mother, healthy and hale; both were visions of growing up turned inside-out, her mother alive, the school dead.

She broke the lock with her telekinesis and stepped up the lane.

To be polite, she knocked first. When no one answered, she unlocked the front door the same way and let herself in. 

If the grounds had been bad, the mansion was worse. Dust particles floated down, golden specks briefly suspended in the light creeping in from the windows. There was clutter—everywhere, and not in the benign way that children left little hurricanes of mess everywhere they went, this was a deep pit of regret, of sorrow accumulated over the years. If they still had the mansion, in fact, Jean suspected that this was what it might have looked like, now… now that Magneto was gone.

She reached out with her telepathy. It was more difficult now that the Phoenix had been ripped from her so traumatically, so painfully, but she got a fuzzy sense of three minds: one nervous and meticulous, like a solved puzzle box, one deceptively quiet but brimming with anger, like a pot about to boil over. And a third mind, strangely muted, but one that she would recognize anywhere. “Hello?” she called out.

“…Hello?” came a voice, bewildered, in return. A skinny, soft-faced man stuck his head out of where the classrooms had been, in her time, and blinked owlishly at her. Hank. He looked exactly the same as when she’d been younger, when he’d still been able to manufacture the serum; apparently he’d always had that baby-face and inquisitive look.

She smiled at him. “Hello, Dr. McCoy.”

“Do I… know you?” Hank asked hesitantly.

“Not yet,” she told him. It was a strange sort of dissonance to realize that he’d been a fully-grown man at the moment that she’d been an infant in Ithaca. His mutation kept him young-looking, but she’d always thought of him as closer in age to her and Scott and Ororo than to the Professor, but that was wrong, wasn’t it? He’d been the Professor and Magneto’s companion long before he’d been hers. “I need to speak to the Professor. Is he here?”

Hank’s expression shuttered. “There’s no one here by that name,” he said, which was a lie, and worse, an obvious one; the school had begun years ago—she was sure of it—it said so on the crest that had come with her acceptance letter, on the sign that hung outside the gates where the happiest years of her life had died. “Est. 1963.” This was his family home. Was he sick? Injured?

She wished her telepathy weren’t broken, that she could probe his mind for truth. She set her jaw. “Please take me to him,” she said, cool and calm, an X-man until the end. “I’m not leaving until I see him.”

“Miss, I have no idea how you got inside, but you have to leave—”

He reached for her, and on instinct she ripped the chandelier out from the ceiling and flung it at him, twisted the dull, unpolished metal struts to pin him to the wall. His face rippled blue, then blanched white. “You’re—”

“A mutant,” she confirmed.

“Your power—metal—?!”

“No,” she said, startled. “General telekinesis.” And Hank—relaxed? Well, for a given sense of the word; he struggled against the chandelier, but she’d anchored the metal supports firmly into the wall, and in his human-appearing form he was no match for them. Why didn’t he just shift, she wondered. A voice called out from upstairs, startling her—still not the right one—

“Hank? What the hell was that?”

“Uh,” Hank said. “You’d better get down here.” He eyed her. She looked back at him and tried to convey her resolve, her utter determination that this was the only thing that mattered in the world, because in a way, it was. “Bring… bring him, too.”

A muffled curse. Then—

“What’s going on,” called a third voice, groggy and grouchy-sounding, and there. There he was.

Charles Xavier she recognized instantly, even though he was walking and had hair and was lacking all of the gravitas she associated with him—there was just something _about_ him, a presence, that drew the eye and the soul. The man hovering at his side she took longer to place, but his angular features and floppy hair, even if it was blonde, finally clued her in. Scott’s long-dead brother, Alex Summers. He’d vanished in Vietnam.

A thrill of joy went through her. Even if she couldn’t save Scott from that pain, she could give him the gift of seeing his brother, one last time—

But she was getting ahead of herself, she had to convince them to help her first—

The boy-Professor was staring at her now. “Hello,” he said, and it was almost so very much like the man she remembered that she beamed, a smile that disappeared when she registered what he said next— “I don’t remember ordering a woman. Hank. Did you order me a woman.”

She looked him over again coolly, this time taking in the bloodshot eyes, the stench of weed clinging to him, the hair that evidently hadn’t been cut in a while. He was wearing a shirt that—was eerily similar to her own borrowed blouse, actually, 60s fashion was _wild_ —but his was stained, with holes that look like they’d come from a carelessly dropped cigarette burned into the cuffs. 

_Professor,_ she thought, not at the _child_ before her but at the man she knew, the man who’d raised her, the man who, even now, was waiting for her to return with desperate hope, _you used to be_ such _a loser._

Alex was surveying her coolly, the same assessing gaze that Scott was capable of. It was in the furrow of the brow, the way his whole face turned toward her like a satellite dish. “Who are you?”

“My name is Jean Grey,” she said, gentling her voice. She knew she’d gone cold and hard after years of fighting, years of loss. But for these children, for these children who did not yet even understand the meaning of suffering, who could not even picture the genocide to come, she could be soft, she could be the woman who had once walked the grounds of this school and bandaged scraped knees, smoothed back hair as children cried. “I’m a mutant. I come from the future, and I need your help.”

Charles—she could only think of him as _Charles_ —looked at her. And then he started to laugh.

“God, Hank,” he sputtered out in between chuckles, “what was _in_ that bottle at the back of the kitchen cupboard? Because I’m having the wildest trip.”

“Charles—” Hank began to say, hesitant.

“This isn’t a hallucination, and it’s not a joke,” she said crisply. “Read my mind.”

Hank cringed. Charles’s laughter died off.

“This isn’t fun anymore. I’m going back to bed,” he said, a hint of sullenness in his voice.

Jean gritted her teeth. “Fine.” This was going to hurt. She gathered up as much as she could—nothing more than impressions, of blood and death and screaming, and the Professor’s expression as he took her face in his hands and said, “Jean, are you sure about this—” and _shoved._ It was strange, like there was a bubble around Charles keeping out psychic connection, but not like a deliberately placed shield, more like his mind was too fuzzy to latch onto, and she already had a splitting headache but he had to know, he had to _see._ She barreled past the sticky surface of his mind and into the core of it and dropped her little bomb of sensation and feeling, and the last thing she heard before everything went black was the way he cried out, a cry echoed with her own voice, as he fell to the floor.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	3. 1963: The Last Good Night

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1963.

On the last night they spent together before the world ended, Charles and Erik stayed up late, though they knew they shouldn’t, though they knew Charles had class tomorrow and in a few hours Erik would be melting and shattering his way through a military base, possibly killing, certainly putting himself at risk. They didn’t drink—Erik never drank before a mission, and though Charles had long used the sleepy softness of wine to dull the edges of all the minds pressing against his, it was less effective than blanketing himself in Erik’s mind, an analgesic more powerful than any substance he’d ever tried. They played a game of chess, then another, barely speaking. Charles won the first; Erik won the second. 

The last day they spent together before the world ended had been a good one. Charles had opened his eyes and found that sometime since the last time he’d woken up and stretched to prevent sores from forming, Erik had wrapped himself around him, a loss of control that he rarely indulged in, even when sleeping. He lay over Charles like he was dreaming of protecting him with his body, the way he’d done on that plane as they’d crashed into the beach, the way Charles knew he would’ve done with the bullets had he been paying attention, had he had the fine control that he usually exhibited when he hadn’t been pulling submarines from the water. Charles poked at his side. Erik grunted and stirred.

“Erik,” he said, “you’re pushing on my bladder.”

Erik only grunted again and cuddled him tighter. Charles sighed and set to kissing him awake. He was a deep sleeper when he was in bed with Charles—and never anytime else, when he fell asleep in the library waiting for Charles to finish helping a student with homework, when he collapsed on the couch after returning from a mission, too tired to even trek the few halls to their bedroom, he would wake at the soft press of a footstep, the smallest touch of his arm—as well as an avowed night owl, and Charles had found that the most foolproof way of getting him was getting him _up._

Erik _mrr_ ed and shoved his face further into Charles’s armpit, dodging his lips. Charles sighed fondly and assessed the urgency of his need. Erik didn’t always sleep as well as he would’ve liked, though Charles always seemed to bounce off the surface of his worst dreams when he tried to slip in to soothe them. He could wait another ten minutes.

— ⓧ —

When he was at home, Erik cooked. Erik and Angel were the only ones capable of making food; Angel was slightly better, but Erik’s talents meant that it was easier for him to make the large quantities required to feed Charles’s teachers, his own commando team, and the handful of students who had started boarding there full-time. Erik sometimes asked, a teasing glint in his eye, what they did when he and Angel were both on missions. (Charles didn’t tell him that he’d bought a copy of _The Joy of Cooking_ and was applying himself to it with the same fervor that had gotten him his PhD, with little success. Erik would only laugh and then cut himself off, swimming in that deep well of fondness that Charles knew frightened him, the idea that he could feel so much for someone else.)

Sean had elected to accompany Erik on his missions, but though they would leave tonight, he was here now, and bickering with Alex, as per usual. They were a cabal of loners, but Sean, who came from a household of three sisters and two brothers, had adjusted the most easily, and contributed the most to what Charles was suspecting was the sense of _family_ that had begun to permeate the school grounds, even when half that family was absent. 

Erik sipped from a cup of coffee and watched them, his eyes hooded with contentment, as the kitchen whirled with activity around him; griddles flipping pancakes, whisks beating eggs, skillets frying bacon and hash. It had taken him a while to get the hang of multitasking, but he said he liked it, that it helped him hone his powers; that what he and Charles had done with the satellite dish had changed the scope of things he was capable of forever, but that he still needed to concentrate when it came to fine control (as, neither of them ever said, the bullet in Charles’s spine had proved). So he didn’t talk in the mornings, just leaned against the counter and sank into a state that hummed against Charles’s telepathy like meditation, a soothing, almost subconscious buzz of activity blanketed with a deep, slow, spreading peace.

Once, Erik had told him that peace had never been an option for him, and Charles had never been more glad to prove someone wrong; not even his dissertation advisers, not even his mother, not even himself.

— ⓧ —

When Erik and the others were home, the school became much more school-like. They had eight students now, and they managed well enough when Erik’s team was gone, but when Charles wasn’t teaching every subject, it freed him up to work with Cerebro to recruit more students (and teachers, Erik said wryly in bed one night, and Charles started, having never considered that before; but Erik was right, Alex and Hank were the only mutants who stayed at the mansion full-time instead of accompanying Erik on his missions, and neither of them could be trusted in a classroom of preteens, though for very different reasons—Hank was unbearably awkward and Alex irresponsibly _laissez-faire_ ), to develop lesson plans, and to plan, with Erik, how to handle the inevitable reaction of the world to mutantkind, though Erik, whose glass was less half-empty than it was cracked and drained mostly to the dregs, often disagreed with him on what form that reaction would inevitably take. 

Erik’s father had been a math professor, and Erik remembered enough of his childhood before the war and his father’s strict insistence that he learn his sums in a way that befitted a math professor’s son that he could teach maths to their cadre of youngsters well enough. He taught European languages, too, assisted by Janos and Azazel at times. Janos, it turned out, had an abiding love of literature; a relief to Charles, whose last literature class had been when he was nineteen, and it had mostly focused on Tolstoy and the Russians, not exactly something he could teach to a class whose oldest student was ten. And Azazel, who had been alive an unsettlingly long time, taught history well enough, though Charles supposed he ought to find someone who was capable of teaching history before the nineteenth century at some point, and without Azazel’s monarchist bias.

It was a precious gift, watching Erik turn his considerable talents and charisma to innocent ends, to see him bending down to help a student struggling with multiplication instead of clenching a fist and driving a metal spike through someone’s heart. 

Raven, who Erik had been training in hand-to-hand combat, and Alex had started developing a self-defense curriculum which the children adored. (”Don’t you remember that our favorite pastime when we were that age was hitting each other with sticks?” Raven had asked, amused, when he’d expressed his dismay at this turn of events.) Erik approved, of course; Charles didn’t, but this was one of their compromises. They weren’t training an army, but if the students wanted to learn how to defend themselves—from _anyone_ who might hurt them, not just humans—then they would teach them. And if it helped them learn how to control their powers, as their little team’s training for Shaw had helped Alex and Sean and Hank and Raven, so much the better.

— ⓧ —

“If this is to be a school for mutants, it must offer the students something that they wouldn’t get in a school for humans,” Erik said over an early dinner, which they took sitting on Charles’s balcony, watching Sean cajole three or four children into a game of kickball on the grounds. “That’ll end well,” Erik added sarcastically, jerking his chin to indicate Sean strapping on his flight suit.

“Let them have their fun. And they’re accepted here, isn’t that enough?”

“It’s a start.” Erik ate quickly and methodically, at a machinelike pace, and Charles sometimes wondered if he even tasted what he put into his mouth; it would explain a lot about the way Angel perpetually claimed that he undersalted the food if he didn’t, actually. “But it’s capable of more. _You’re_ capable of more, Charles. The way you guided us, helped us learn to control our powers in the run-up to Cuba… you could do that for these children.”

“That was different,” Charles protested. “We were preparing them for battle.”

“Fine,” Erik said, having resigned himself to the fact that the inevitability of battle was something he and Charles would never agree on. “But in many ways that control has helped them in different aspects of their lives. Alex no longer lives in solitary confinement for fear of hurting someone; and haven’t you noticed how much happier Raven is now that she walks around blue?”

Charles shifted. Raven was a sore spot between them, the way Erik admitted that he’d kissed her the night before Cuba (”Completely platonically,” he’d protested, and Charles had rejoined, incredulous, “Said my lover who _kissed_ my _sister”_ ), the way Raven was still prickly and standoffish to Charles sometimes and always open and friendly to Erik. He knew he’d made mistakes when it came to how he’d treated her, that he’d said exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time—that, in fact, when it came to people he couldn’t use his telepathy on, he was beginning to suspect that he said the wrong thing more often than the right thing—but Raven was still the person he most wanted to protect in the world, and it chafed that she seemed unwilling to give him the opportunity to make it up to her. “What would I teach them?” he asked instead of stepping into that minefield. “Idie can melt ice cubes with a touch. Quentin gets migraines when he tries to project telepathically.”

“You could teach them discipline,” Erik said. “You could teach them control.”

“You,” Charles said, “would be much better at that than I, my love.”

Erik smiled, a private agreeing quirk of lips. “You could teach them… that what they can do is beautiful, and not to be afraid of themselves. And _that_ I know you’re capable of.”

“Are they afraid?” Charles asked, rattled, and Erik hadn’t answered, had merely cut into his roast with the precision and intensity he applied to everything.

— ⓧ —

They tried to eat an early dinner together once a week, because after dinner, Charles was always in high demand. Their evenings glittered, passed in a whirling dervish of homework-helping and games and fires crackling in the hearth as they crowded into the sitting rooms, nearly all of them, students and teachers and commandos, everyone Charles loved in the world. 

That evening, Charles got stuck with science homework, explaining Mendelian inheritance over and over again, using different metaphors each time and only thinking a little longingly of the time when he’d been teaching undergraduates the same material but with substantially longer words. Across the room, Erik smirked each time Hisako protested, “But I still don’t get it,” from where he was playing a multilingual game of Scrabble with Azazel and Janos. Raven dozed in a chair by the fire, Idie played quietly with a set of paper dolls at her feet; she’d colored the doll’s skin in blue and added little purple scales, and Raven had grown misty-eyed when she’d seen it. Angel was reading an Agatha Christie novel, Sean sneaking covert looks over her shoulder.

He would remember the way he had been so lonely at Oxford, the way he’d had a Raven drifting further away from him every day, and could barely reconcile that life with this one, which was so full of laughter and minds bright and shimmering like jewels set into the dusty old manor, bringing luster and life where there had once been only dust. Charles was so happy he could burst, or float, or fly. It was the most perfect thing he could imagine.

— ⓧ —

They hadn’t said _I love you_ since that day on the beach, but Charles thought he knew.

— ⓧ —

Late that evening, they retired to the study and played chess. They always played before Erik left, they kept playing even as he stood and walked out to the lawn, where Azazel and the others were waiting for him; Erik would visualize the board in his mind and Charles would move the heavy wooden pieces for him. It was a silly superstition, but Charles always made sure that Erik left in the middle of a game—as though it would ensure that he would return to finish it. They played in their minds until the connection between them faltered, then faded into a silence that was terrible and crushing, every time.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	4. 1968: With a Little Help from My Students

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1968.

Jean stirred.

She was lying on a hard surface. She was alive, so it didn’t seem as though the Sentinels had caught up to her, and—in a rush, it all came flooding back to her. The machine, her mother, the Professor-before-he-was-the-Professor. She turned her head to her side and saw Charles, laid out on what must be the dining table next to her, staring at her with something very much like horror.

“Do you believe me now?” she said coolly.

Above them, Alex—Alex _Summers_ , and wasn’t that strange, the brother Scott had never really known but had grown up idolizing nevertheless, the brother whose letters to Scott he’d cherished right up until he’d lost them when the mansion went up in flames—and Hank hovered nervously. “What just happened?” Hank demanded, a dangerous edge to his voice. She recognized it; the Beast coming out, the sharp ragged tone that he usually only brought out when somebody was touching a new invention of his, that, in the last months, she’d only heard in reference to the time machine. Strange, that it was being aimed at her, who’d always been allowed in the workshop, if only to see her passport to the past coming together. “What did you do?”

“She… You’re a telepath,” Charles said, sounding a little dazed.

Jean jerked her head in something that was half a nod, half a shake. “Not a very strong one,” she said, although the words ached in her mouth. Once upon a time that would’ve been a lie. “But yes, I have telepathic abilities.” To Hank, “I showed him my future. Forgive me for not showing you as well; that mental push exhausted me, and, frankly, no one should have those memories in their heads if it’s not completely necessary.”

“Are you buying this, Charles?” Alex growled. But Charles couldn’t take his eyes off her, and she knew she had him.

“Your world, it’s…” he said, faltering.

“ _Your_ world, too,” Jean said. “It’s what happens, inevitably, if you do nothing. If you carry on the way you have been. If you eventually pull yourself out of… whatever this is and restart the school, if you take me and my friends in and teach us, guide us, if you fight your entire life for peace between mutants and humans… that’s the future you build.”

Her words had the desired effect; Charles drew himself up, a desperation in his eyes. Good, that was the appropriate response. It was Charles Xavier. High, drunk, whatever was wrong with him, he could bury his desire to do right by mutantkind, but he couldn’t rid himself of it entirely. She knew him better than that. “God,” he said, and then leaned over the side of the dining table and retched.

Well. She could work with that.

— ⓧ —

“I’m sorry,” she said fifteen minutes later, unable to stop herself from pulling back his hair maternally as he threw up what seemed like the last three liquid meals he’d consumed. He was just so _young_ , as young as Kitty had been, as young as the last students she’d taught before the mansion had fallen. She was genuinely contrite; perhaps she’d put more blood and gore in the memories than she’d intended? Or perhaps in her clumsiness she’d inflicted some mild damage on his mind. “My powers… they’re unstable at the best of times. You might have gotten something I didn’t intend to send… or…”

“I don’t know… what you want me to do,” he mumbled at last. Hank plied him with water anxiously. He gargled and spat into the basin Alex was holding out. In spite of herself, she stroked his hair. She’d seen the Professor drunk and depressed before, more so after Magneto had died and he’d started visiting Forge’s still semi-regularly, but that was still new— _hair._ “I don’t know why you came to me.”

 _“Please_ ,” Alex said, “explain what is going on in small words to someone who doesn’t have mental mind-reading powers.”

Jean glanced at Hank, who still looked as though he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to drag Charles over to a fainting couch to rest or bare his teeth at her, and sighed. “Did you get the part where my name is Jean, I’m a mutant, and I come from the future?” she said wearily.

“Yes,” Hank mumbled. “And I have _so many questions._ ”

“In the year 2010, the governments of the world banded together to introduce a machine that would be used to police mutants. They called them Sentinels,” Jean said, dredging up the memories of when it had started, when they had been hopeful that this was a temporary setback to the cause of mutant rights, when they had been incapable of imagining what it really was the start of. “Two years later, they revealed what the Sentinels were really intended for when they launched a large-scale attack to wipe out all of mutantkind.”

Alex stopped moving. Hank reeled backwards. Charles retched again.

Relentless, Jean continued, “For the last eleven years, we’ve been surviving by the skin of our teeth. Mutants have always been an endangered species, but… we’re losing the war. And it’s not just us. They started targeting humans who could pass the X-genes on, and society collapsed in on itself. Now, most humans live in walled cities, undergoing regular checks to make sure they won’t be giving birth to mutants anytime soon… and mutants are scavengers, trapped outside the walls and fighting for our lives every day. You,” she said to Hank, “and another mutant called Forge built a machine that would transport me to this time.”

Hank took a shuddering breath. “Charles is right,” he said shakily. “What—what can we do? What is in this time that you need?”

“I’d actually hoped to come out a few years earlier,” Jean admitted, “so I could stop the Sentinel program from ever being developed… but time travel is an imprecise science.” Charles laughed, a creaky, manic sound. She ignored him, brushed her gray-streaked hair out of her face. “There's a mutant with the power to stop the Sentinels, and I need your help to get him to the future. In exchange, I'll tell you everything about how we got to this point, and you can save your own.”

Alex and Hank exchanged looks over Charles’s head, but it wasn’t them she was worried about. It was Charles, who was wiping his mouth and sitting back on his heels now, who they both looked to instinctively for answers. It was him she needed to convince. It had always been him that she’d needed to convince.

“I’m not the person in your memories, Jean,” he said, more tenderly than she would have expected given what she’d gleaned from the brief press of her mind against his. “That man… he may have been able to convince anyone to do anything, but… I don’t have my powers. And I’m not him.”

“I know that,” she said. “I came because I need _you,_ Charles Xavier of the year 1968. I may not know you, or what you’re capable of. But the Professor did. And he’s the one who told me to come to you. He’s the one who has faith in you.”

“Fuck,” Charles said roughly, “how do you tell your future self that he’s bloody insane?”

“People have tried,” she said with a faint smile. “It never budged him.”

“Fine. Fine.” Charles scrubbed at his face and stood shakily. Hank grabbed for his elbow, but Charles shook him off, muttering, “It’s fine, I just had a dose.” Jean cocked her head, but didn’t ask. She trusted him, in spite of everything she’d seen, she trusted him not to screw up her mission more than it already had been. At least, she trusted him not to screw up right up until she would tell him their target. “Who is the mutant you need my help to recruit?”

“His name is Erik Lehnsherr,” Jean said, and Charles started to laugh, utterly broken, a sound like so much shattered stained glass.

“Listen very carefully to what I’m about to say,” he said. _“Fuck you.”_

He turned and started slowly up the stairs. Jean pushed herself to her feet, but Hank barred her way. Alex hurried to help Charles up; he shook off the hand on his shoulder irritably. 

“That’s it?” Jean called after him. “You’re so afraid of facing your ex again that you’ll let the world burn first?”

Charles turned, spitting mad. “You have _no idea—_ you have _no concept_ of who Erik Lehnsherr is. What he’s done. I watched him turn the world against us because he couldn’t help himself, because he wouldn’t choose to be more than the killer he’s defined himself as. You think he’ll help you? He’ll just make things worse—that’s what he does, that’s what he’s always done.”

“ _Worse_ isn’t possible,” Jean said.

“You don’t know Erik.”

“I do. You sent me back here together.”

It wasn’t strictly true—Magneto hadn’t lived long enough to see the fruits of their labors, to see Jean wrap herself in the cloak of their last chance and hurl herself backwards through time. But Jean thought that, aside from the Professor, she perhaps knew Magneto the best of all the ragtag warriors that had lived and been lost with them over the years. Better, certainly, than this lost boy in front of her now.

Charles looked broken open. His face worked silently, like he was trying and failing to imagine how such a thing was possible. “In the future,” he croaked, “I join him?”

 _In the future, he joins_ you. “In the future,” Jean said reprovingly, “the two of you realize that splitting mutantkind down the middle has caused us more harm than anything the vast majority of humans could have ever done to us. You put aside your differences and dedicate yourselves to both survival and hope. And you lead us. The best we could ever ask for at the end of the world.”

Charles laughed a little wildly. “Now I know you’re full of shite,” he said, and turned to walk back up the stairs. He paused, though, face half-turned to the side, his profile illuminated by the golden shafts of light which could still penetrate the dust-caked windows. “Why on _earth_ would I ever help free Erik when he’s where he belongs?” and though she thought he meant it to sound scathing, it sounded plaintive instead, the cry of a man who genuinely wanted a reason, who had never stopped caring and never stopped trying to justify it to himself.

She could give him a reason. She took a deep breath, and repeated the words the Professor had made her memorize: “Because he is suffering. Because right now, even more than he wishes to see you again, he wishes for death. Because you still love him and you will regret not coming for the rest of your life.”

Charles turned and stormed back up the stairs. By her side, Alex blew at where his hair was falling into his eyes. “Well,” he said, “that went well.”

Jean shook her head. She glanced in the mirror listing by the staircase; she looked very old, and very tired. In her mother’s blouse and jeans, she looked… she looked like the old woman her mother had never had the chance to become, because of her. She shook off the thought and asked Hank, wearily, “What on earth happened here?”

Hank bit his lip. “In the future you come from… the school, it’s running again?”

“It was,” Jean said. “Until the Sentinels destroyed it.”

Hank flinched. She sympathized; this Charles was so bleak, so lost, and the future she was describing must have sounded both idyllic—a Charles who cared again, a Charles who had found his purpose again, a Charles who ran the school and had mentored her and taught her everything she knew about compassion and love—and terrible beyond measure. “After Erik… was arrested,” he said, watching her carefully to see if this would surprise her; she didn’t flinch, “Charles was… he wasn’t the same. He tried, with the school, but the three of us were really the only ones left, and we… we weren’t enough. We made it a year, but he closed the school in 1965.”

“And his powers?”

Hank flushed. She noticed that even now, his blushes were tinged with blue. “He asked me for a serum that would suppress them. He’s… he’s suffered a lot.”

“So have I,” Jean said. “And I know it’s nothing compared to what he’ll suffer in the future.”

She looked down at her worn, tired hands and wondered what she was going to do next. She could try to break Magneto out herself; after some rest, her telekinesis was certainly up to the task of stopping bullets, and it wasn’t like they were going to have Sentinels _already_. But without Charles, how likely was it that this young, damaged Magneto would believe her?

“Can I ask,” Hank said hesitantly, “why Erik? What can he do that none of the rest of us can do?”

“Well,” Jean said. “Sentinels are made of metal.”

Hank’s brow furrowed and she knew at once that he was going to ask her why the older Magneto was incapable of taking care of them, then. But he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Barefoot, with his sleeve rolled up and fresh needlepricks in his arm, Charles trailed a careless hand down the banister until he reached the landing, when he looked at her. Watched her in silence for a while; if she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was reading her mind. 

“Okay,” he said, his eyes red. Somehow, she didn’t think it was from the drugs. “I’ll help.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	5. 1963-1968: Long Way Down

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1963.

Charles would have liked to say that he knew that something was wrong the moment they left on their mission, but it would have been a lie. His range was excellent, even better when it came to Erik—they’d tested once, and he had a vague sense of Alex or Sean as far as a hundred miles away, could read their thoughts within thirty miles, but for people he was especially close to, that range was doubled, even trebled. But it was a big country, and Erik’s little unit of mutant commandos ranged far afield. He liked to pretend that he could still feel Erik wherever he roamed, like the lightest press of their pinkies touching, but in his more cynical moments he knew that was all it was: pretend. Even he had limits, and Erik, it seemed, was destined to push up against them; sometimes in good ways, when he forced Charles to argue more passionately, stand up for his beliefs more firmly, than he’d ever been asked to in his life. And sometimes Erik skirted the boundaries of what Charles was capable of in a way that made him palpably ache with his absence.

He knew, for example, that the work Erik was doing was necessary, though he loathed it. That Erik had made concessions of his own, with his promise that he wouldn’t take life indiscriminately, and that the poor mutants in the facilities he was tearing down, some of whom ended up at the school where he could witness their wounds and traumas firsthand, couldn’t wait for Charles’s slow campaign of tolerance and awareness-raising. But a hard lesson, driven home by his legs, was that just because he understood the use for something didn’t mean he was capable of doing it himself. Erik moved his chair for him, pushed him at times when they needed the intimacy of his hands on the handles, helped him with his warm, sure grasp out of and into bed at night. This was another prosthesis, Erik doing what Charles could not.

Except—

When he woke up on the days that Erik were gone, his bed always seemed very cold.

On what would become, and would remain, he would discover, the worst day of his twentieth century, he reached out for the space where Erik’s mind should have been and encountered nothing but cold air. Tired, wishing he’d slept cocooned in Erik’s mind, for he never seemed to have the running-and-falling dreams when Erik was sleeping beside him, he hoisted himself up and transferred his body to the chair in a practiced move that was, he thought with a little melancholy, becoming more familiar all the time.

Bathroom, breakfast, morning classes; he was drawing Punnett squares for the children when he heard it. A whisper of malcontent.

He paused at the chalkboard. _Erik?_ he thought hesitantly. Was he back? But the connection was stretched thin, thinner than he’d ever felt it before—had they become so entwined with each other that he could feel Erik, even farther than he’d ever been able to with Raven before?

A thought, too muffled for him to catch anything but one word— _Charles_.

“Class dismissed,” he blurted out, then, as fast as he could, wheeled himself out of the room, heading straight for Cerebro.

Panic pounded in his chest. Even when they’d first met, except for the occasional flare of uncontrollable rage, Erik had had the finest control over his emotions of anyone he’d ever encountered. After their training, after they’d discussed serenity and rage, and even on that Cuban beach, Erik had only become better at keeping himself under control. It was one of the things Charles most loved about him: the way his mind ticked along, so orderly, but not in the way that Hank’s or Charles’s own was orderly but rather in the way that a fractal was orderly, a mathematically-perfect piece of stained glass was orderly, and yet stormed and churned with such depth of feeling just below the surface, like the placidity of a glassy ocean concealing a riptide beneath. For him to lose control like this—

Charles considered the possibility that today might be the day he lost his Erik, lost his love, and rejected it. No. No. It was a thought he couldn’t entertain, like Erik’s dire warnings of genocide, like his cynicism and depression. Erik was scared, he could feel that now, but he would endure this, too. He hadn’t survived Sebastian Shaw to be taken down on a routine mission.

He felt Alex pressing at his mind for entrance— _Charles?_ —and realized he must have been projecting his distress, but he brushed aside the inquiries like swatting flies. His whole world had narrowed down to the underground passage that led to Hank’s rebuilt and improved Cerebro. Hank had sequestered himself away with it while Charles had slowly been learning how to _be_ again after Cuba, as though offering the ability to hold the whole world in his mind was any sort of recompense for the use of his legs, and now Charles found himself grateful as the cool blue light registered his retinal print and the door chimed, _“Welcome, Professor,_ ” a little joke of Hank and Raven’s.

His hands ached on the wheels of his chair—it had been a long time since he’d pushed himself so—but he didn’t stop to shake them out, didn’t stop until he was at the end of the platform and raising the helmet, didn’t stop until he’d plunged headfirst into the sea of minds, three billion of them, living and laughing and loving and some of them even as frantic as his own, some of them even searching, searching, for a love that they were desperately hoping was only lost and not _lost_.

Erik, he thought, and at once, snapped together like his mind was magnetized to Erik’s own, he was in Dallas, elbowing his way through a crowd. 

Erik was casting his metal-sense over the crowd with some desperation, sifting through watches and pins and zippers and buckles, and Charles coasted the mental wave, not entirely sure what he was looking for—until Erik’s mind closed around the sense of a gun. He didn’t even bother to bring it to himself; he only floated it in the air to level it at the head of the man who’d been carrying it, and fired.

The crowd screamed—and a thousand miles away, Charles screamed with them in the bowels of Cerebro as horror washed over him like a sickly tide.

 _Charles_ , Erik thought, recognition, not desperation this time. There was a frozen moment where they seemed to stare at each other across a great divide, all those lives, all those miles between them narrowed down to a point of nothing. Then Erik shoved him out of his mind with such violence that Charles cried out and jerked backwards, pulling Cerebro’s helmet to the very edge of its tether, but he was still plugged in, he couldn’t escape—he was plunged into the minds of the crowd, the screaming, the horror that mirrored his own—someone was dead, someone _important_ , and he couldn’t say whether that was his own sense of loss or theirs—he felt people shoving and stumbling, the fear of a stampede, a bone-deep shock.

When he’d regrouped and pulled a sense of himself together from the screaming riptide of minds that had submerged him, he started looking for Erik’s face. He caught a glimpse of Erik’s gray trilby here—a slanting view of his focused, deadly gaze there—a corner of his flapping coat. _Erik!_ he called out, though he knew no one was listening. _Erik!_

And distantly, in the corner of his mind, he felt a bullet curving. He was familiar with the sensation, with hours Erik had spent practicing in the little corner of the manor grounds they’d set up as a shooting range, firing and deflecting bullets in the same gesture, over and over again until Erik could bend the path of bullets in his sleep. He knew the guilt that drove him, and he’d ridden along at the edges of Erik’s mind as he pushed himself, over and over again, to learn the fine control he hadn’t had on that Cuba beach, a pleasant vacation from his own mind, drugged to the gills and still in pain as he was.

Abruptly, another mind—he couldn’t tell whose—blinked out. And Erik’s, at the same moment. Charles lost the slippery edges of the mind he’d been touching, just to reassure himself of its presence, even if he wasn’t allowed in, and fell, fell, _fell._

— ⓧ —

“Charles. _Charles._ ”

Charles stirred. He was slumped over Cerebro’s console, the helmet digging into his scalp and cheek. For a moment, he didn’t remember why he was here—had he passed out again searching for students?—but Hank’s blue, furry paw was on his shoulder, and he sounded—frightened. Not fondly exasperated, the way he usually was when Charles over-exerted himself on Cerebro, but genuinely terrified.

“Charles, you have to get up. It’s the President. Charles. Please. Charles.”

 _Please, Erik,_ he thought, for no reason at all, and then it all came rushing horribly back.

— ⓧ —

Hank insisted on bandaging where the sharp edge of Cerebro’s helmet had dug into the crest of his cheek. Charles watched the news broadcast, numb, barely feeling Hank’s fine fiddling with his injury, barely noticing the fear and lack of understanding that radiated from the children crowded on the stairs.

Already the conspiracy theories were coming out. The CIA. The FBI. The bullet curved.

The bullet had curved.

A trick of the footage, people were saying, except it hadn’t been. Charles knew it hadn’t been, as surely as he knew his own name, as surely as he knew the dark corners of Erik’s heart.

— ⓧ —

That _bastard_. That thoughtless, heartless—

— ⓧ —

Hank canceled classes for the rest of the day, which was good, because Charles wasn’t sure he had the mental energy to do even that. And the next day, which ended up being a good thing, because Azazel’s red smoke filled the sitting room just past sundown, belching out Raven and Sean and Angel and Janos—everyone who’d followed Erik’s on a fool’s mission that had turned into an assassination. Raven immediately shifted into her blue form the second she was in the safety of the manor walls, but before she did, Charles caught a glimpse of how pale her fair-skinned double was. He sympathized. Erik had betrayed them all, in the end.

Except—

Raven raked a hand through her hair, anxious, furious. “He’s been captured,” she said, her words falling out in a jumble. “Charles, do you think you can find out where he’s being held with Cerebro—?”

Charles’s stomach plummeted as he realized what he would have to do. It was, he thought vaguely and nonsensically, a bit like explaining to a younger sibling that Santa wasn’t real, except as a child Raven had been the suspicious one, the sharp-edged one, the one explaining to Charles that the world didn’t work the way he thought it did. “Raven,” he said, trying to keep his tone as gentle as possible but feeling cracked open and hearing it come out as strain in his voice, “Erik killed the President. He’s… I can’t do it.”

Which made it sound like Erik was being held somewhere his powers couldn’t reach, but Raven stared at him, and he knew she understood. She always understood. “You mean you _won’t_ do it,” she said faintly. “You won’t even try.”

“Raven, he _killed the President_. He assassinated him in cold blood—”

“You won’t even give him a chance to explain,” Raven said, her voice rising in pitch and volume. Around her, Sean and Angel edged backwards, but Sean was looking at him like he’d never seen him before and Charles wanted to scream. “After all he’s done for us—”

“ _All he’s done?!”_ Charles shouted. “He’s painted a target on our backs! What if they trace his activities back to the school?!”

“Shut up,” Raven said, “shut up, Charles—”

“The bullet bent on _live TV_ , and if we’re very unlucky this will be the first society ever hears of mutants, that we killed the President! He’s done more to put back the cause of mutant rights than Sebastian Shaw—”

Raven slapped him. He reeled back, but not because of the pain—he’d gone too far, he knew he had, he was _always_ saying the wrong thing when he couldn’t read someone’s mind—but because her face had drained of rage, falling into a blank, inscrutable mask. When she spoke, it took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. “I thought you’d changed. I thought _he’d_ changed you. I thought you finally found someone worth putting aside your precious preoccupation with how the world sees you, and I was happy for you, even if you couldn’t do it for me. But it’ll never be mutants first with you, will it? You can adopt them, you can love them, but you’ll betray them. You’ll always betray them.”

Raven loved Erik, too. Not for the first time, Charles wondered if she’d loved Erik as much as Charles had, in the same way Charles had. 

“Raven,” Charles said, vibrating with rage, “it’s not me who’s betrayed you.”

“Isn’t it?” Raven asked, blank as paper, mild as milk. “The Denver safehouse,” she said to Azazel, and he stepped forward and took her shoulder, and for the rest of his life Charles would wonder if he’d had time to reach out and grab her before she disappeared or if she’d moved too quickly out of his reach, if she’d always been moving away from him and he’d never noticed.

He wouldn’t see her again for ~~twenty-two~~ five years.

— ⓧ —

1964.

Their first semester ended disastrously, with Charles all but sleepwalking through his classes. Hank and Alex tried to pick up the slack, but the mansion seemed very empty now, like echoes had taken up residence in the draftier corners and crannies. It hadn’t been like this when the others were out on mission; it was their permanent loss, Sean and Angel, even Janos and Azazel, and especially Raven, that shaped the aura of absence that had settled over the manor.

The children kept asking after Erik and the others, and Charles never had an answer for them.

Still, they persevered. Eventually the children stopped asking, though they grew suspicious and paranoid that Hank or Alex or Charles might leave at any moment, and that was another thing to hate Erik for, that he’d managed to traumatize these children with his simple non-presence. They made it another semester, and closed for the summer, Hank obviously hoping that Charles would use the time to regroup. He didn’t. He faded, almost, the longer time went on and the more acutely he missed them, his friends and his sister and his… whatever Erik had been to him.

His love, he knew, deep down in a place to which he refused to give voice. He missed his only love.

In September, Charles broke, like he knew he would, and wheeled into Cerebro, ready to—if not forgive, at least listen. At least find out what on _earth_ Erik had been _thinking_ when he’d killed the President, if he’d given any thought at all to the school, to Charles, who’d only escaped scrutiny due to sheer dumb luck. He put on the helmet, and cast out for Erik’s mind—

—and hit a wall, as solid and unforgiving as steel.

Charles groped for a latch, a seam, any sign that Erik had left a back door for him—and of course the defenses couldn’t stand up to him, certainly not in Cerebro, but the wall was so thick that Charles feared tearing it down might well damage Erik’s mind permanently—and he didn’t want that. He was heartsick and tired but he didn’t want that—but he found nothing. Erik was closed to him, as surely and irrevocably as when he’d been wearing Shaw’s helmet, but this almost hurt worse than the blank spot in the world that had felt like death, like Erik’s death. This was a conscious, constant decision to push Charles away. To keep him out.

It was true, then. Erik had killed the President, and robbed Charles of any explanation, any chance of reconciliation. Erik had been faced with a choice and chosen anything-but-Charles. And it was incomprehensible, it was impossible to square with the Erik who had loved him, the Erik whose mind he thought he knew intimately—but also, those neat little hiding places in that beautiful clockwork mind—had he ever really known Erik at all?

Had Erik been right about himself? About his fundamental nature? Frankenstein’s monster, and Charles thought about the moment in which he knew, he _knew_ , that Erik had contemplated following in Shaw’s footsteps. Had hated the thought of it, had hated himself, but had seen no other future for a thing like him. Maybe Erik had been right. A soul too stained with shadow to save.

Charles put his hands in his face and wept.

At the end of that semester, he closed the school, and was impressed with himself for having lasted so long.

— ⓧ —

1965.

At least there was scotch.

— ⓧ —

1966.

In April, Hank slunk into the room that had once been his study and now was more like his opium den. “I think…”

“Spit it out, Hank,” Charles had said, staring into the bottom of his glass and wondering where all the bourbon had got to.

Hank took a deep breath, and Charles momentarily felt a flicker of regret. All he had left were Hank and Alex, though, and he loved them for it, though they weren’t… they weren’t enough. “Professor—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Charles,” Hank said, gentle, warm. “I think… would you like to walk again?”

“I’d rather stop dreaming,” Charles slurred, and tipped over the edge into sleep. He then proceeded to forget about the conversation for months.

But Hank didn’t.

— ⓧ —

On one of his more sober days—marijuana and beer, not bourbon and scotch—Hank sat down across from him again and said, “Charles, were you serious about… about wanting to turn off your mutation?”

“God, yes,” Charles muttered. When he was younger, it had been difficult to bear, but nothing like this—he’d grown used, in those golden, glorious months, to using Erik’s mind to anchor himself, and now without that, he felt adrift, like a boat cut off from shore that had only just realized what it was missing. “I’d cut off my ears if I thought it would help my stop hearing _every. Bloody. Thing._ ”

Hank took a deep breath and blurted out in a rush, “I’ve developed a serum that I think can suppress mutation. Yours… and mine. And I think… test trials have shown temporary regenerative properties in mice… I think it can heal your spine. You might be able to walk again.”

“You had me at telepathy blocker,” Charles said.

— ⓧ —

The drug glittered in the glass vial, an amber as deep and rich as Raven’s eyes. Charles sighed with pleasure as he felt the coolness slither through his veins; not because of the sudden return of feeling to his legs, not because of the metallic taste at the back of his tongue, not even for the sensation itself, which was actually a little painful.

At last. At last, the world was quiet.

— ⓧ —

1967.

— ⓧ —

1968.

One day, a telepath walked into his house and shattered the carefully-constructed barrier he’d erected between himself and the world.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	6. 1968: Inside

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1968.

Around Charles’s large dining table—which she touched reverently, thinking of hundreds of mealtimes, Jubilation showing off the new trick she’d figured out to make Jean laugh when she was young and shy and newly orphaned, playing footsie with Scott under the table, telekinetically separating kids playing footsie when she became a teacher herself, all the scorch marks and scratches that this table didn’t have yet but would accumulate over time and love… and somewhere, the remains of this table sitting in the wreckage of the mansion—they settled in to make a battle plan.

“Do you even know where he is?” Charles asked dully. After he’d agreed to help, a spark seemed to have gone out of him, like it was less concession than total surrender on his part.

“He's being held beneath the Pentagon,” Jean told him.

Charles laughed, a little hysterically. “Oh, the Pentagon. And I suppose the US military won’t mind us just waltzing in and taking him, hm?”

“I actually have the plans for the cell he’s in,” Hank said hesitantly. When Charles looked at him incredulously, he said, a little more gently, “I figured that one day… you would eventually want to go get him. So I got the plans a few years ago.”

“Fuck,” Charles said, and buried his head in his hands. “Looks like everyone saw this coming but me, hmm?”

Hank spread out the plans on the dining table. Jean, who knew this part of her history very well, given how thoroughly the Professor had drilled her, was pointing to the cell schematics before Beast could begin. “He’s in a repurposed WWII-era bunker, the foundation pure concrete and sand. There are two checkpoints down to the cell where metal detectors make sure that nothing manipulable is brought within range of his abilities.”

Alex turned to Charles hesitantly. “Could you—”

“You know,” Charles said coldly, “that even if I went off the serum, my powers have been… erratic. I couldn’t guarantee that I could control that many minds, even if I were at my best.”

“Cerebro?” Jean asked. Hank jerked his head in a clear indication for her to shut up. Charles laughed a little wildly.

“You’re a telepath, aren’t you?” he said snappishly. “Why don’t you use it yourself?”

Jean frowned. She’d once been strong enough to use it—stronger even than the Professor—but Cerebro had been one of the first casualties of the Sentinel War, along with the Phoenix, so she’d never had the ability to test her new self against it. But she knew that Emma Frost had once struggled to use it, and she knew that she was weaker now than Emma had been, much as it chafed to admit. “I don’t think I’m powerful enough,” she admitted. “I can try…”

“No,” Hank said quickly. “I… there were plans to add failsafes to Cerebro to prevent it from overloading on a non-telepath or weak telepath, but… I never built them. If you’re not confident in your abilities, it could very well fry your brain.”

“Thank god for the birth of quality control,” Jean muttered. It was true, it seemed—from lead paint to asbestos, everything was shoddier in the 60s. She shook it off and refocused. Without telepathic intervention, their task would be more difficult, true, but even without his powers, Charles was an invaluable asset, as no one else would be able to convince Erik of the truth of her mad story. She considered Hank and Alex, and then a thought came to her. “What about other mutants?”

“We, uh,” Hank said, “we’re not in contact with… the Brotherhood.”

“I didn’t mean them,” Jean said, though Mystique would have come in handy. Wasn’t she active during this period? “I mean former students, or…” and a flash of inspiration— “…future students.” _Of course._ “I have an idea,” she said, and bared her teeth in what she suspected looked more like a threat than a smile from the way Charles flinched back.

— ⓧ —

A few quick calculations—they would be fifteen years old.

Well, that was the perfect age to do stupid things like break into the Pentagon.

— ⓧ —

How on earth had she lived thirty years of her life before the Internet? They eventually found the Maximoffs in the phone book, of all places. Hank drove; she pressed her face to the window and soaked in more life. Charles sat sullenly in the backseat, Alex fidgeting beside him. It was really remarkable how much he resembled his brother, except without Scott’s meticulous and well-honed self-control.

They knocked on the door and she prepared to push a strong suggestion that they were the school-age friends of her children to Oksana Maximoff’s mind. It turned out not to be necessary. “Oh, god, what’s he done now?” she sighed.

Oh, Peter, she thought fondly, and though he had been dead for years, she sent a wish for him to never change into the air wherever gods lived.

Oksana let them upstairs without another question, and Jean opened the door to a near-replica of what Peter’s room at the mansion had looked like—complete with obviously stolen arcade games, records, a television set, and piles of junk food that had clearly been taken more for the aesthetic than for any function. Peter had his feet up on an ottoman when they knocked, trying to look innocuous, although if anything the juxtaposition of his innocent smile and the piles of stolen trash around him just made him look guiltier. “Hi,” he said sweetly, and then immediately ruined it. “You’re not from the school. Well, not from _my_ school. And I really don’t think you’re here to take me to a place for ‘gifted youngsters,’ unless that’s a euphemism. Is it a euphemism?”

Twenty-five years from now, Jean would have rolled her eyes and told him to get up and make himself useful for once in his life. Now, she was acutely aware that he was a child and she was… _not,_ and more, that she was a stranger and he was not.

Alex leaned closer to her. _“This_ ,” he said significantly, in tones so droll that she’d previously thought only Scott was capable of them, “is your secret weapon?”

“Weapon?” Peter had perked up. “Am I a weapon? Who are we fighting?”

Jean put on a smile. “We find ourselves in need of people with… special skills. Skills like yours.”

“What kind of skills?” Peter lied baldly.

“Yeah,” Charles grumbled. “What kind of skills?”

Jean raised an eyebrow at Peter. There was absolutely no way he was going to turn down an invitation like that; it was what had caused him the majority of the trouble he’d gotten into in his teenage years. Sure enough, Peter was, all at once, leaning against the pool table he’d crammed into a corner of the room and flicking through Charles’s wallet. “How do you pronounce your last name, man?” he asked Charles, who had immediately gone into a flap trying to figure out how he’d done that. “Zavier. Savior. _Exx-_ avior—”

“Yes, that,” Charles snapped. “Give that back to me.”

“Teleporter?” Hank, at least, sounded fascinated.

“No,” Jean said, with, she was astonished to find, a little bit of pride. They’d served together, after all. “He’s just very, very fast.”

Peter bowed. “I can get anything,” he bragged. “But what’s in it for me?”

“Peter?” a girl’s voice called up the stairs then. “Who’s up there?”

Before Alex could stop him, Peter had bellowed back, “Hey, I think they want me to help them steal something!”

Charles looked around, wide-eyed. Jean focused on the pounding of feet up the stairs, which coalesced into a girl with a sneer and a protective fist half-raised, ready to punch her way out.

By the time Jean had met her, Wendy had married a nice, normal human and was pregnant with twins; she’d mellowed significantly from this hawk-eyed raven girl glaring at her from the stairs. The resemblance to her father was astonishing, down to the way she raised her hands, ready for battle, in case they turned out to be mutant-, Jew-, or Romani-hating neo-Gestapo here to incarcerate or maim them. Charles’s eyes flickered right over her and Jean wondered, again, how high he was; even at the height of her and Scott’s estrangement, if she’d encountered a child as Scottlike as this girl was like Magneto, she would have instantly flown to Westchester on Phoenix wings to bombard him with difficult questions. “Who are you?” she snapped.

Hank leaned close to her. “Can you…” he said, and gestured to his head.

Erase her memory, he probably meant. It wasn’t a bad idea; it would show Peter that they were Like Him, and convince him of the seriousness of their mission. But she shook her head. Wendy had always been resistant to telepathy, and besides— “She’s the other half of what I was hoping to find here,” she said lowly.

Peter was easy. Peter was, at heart, the teenage son of a single mother, and longed for what all teenage sons of single mothers longed for: attention, respect, flattery. Wendy, though. Wendy had never been called easy by anyone in her life.

Jean approached her carefully, raising her hands to show that she meant no harm. “My name is Jean,” she said. “I’m like you, and your brother.”

“I doubt that,” Wendy scoffed.

Behind her, Peter was noisily unwrapping a hamburger. She reached out behind her and willed it into her hand, showed it to Wendy’s wide eyes and ignored Peter’s faux-cries of anguish. “I am,” she said. “This is Charles, Hank, and Alex. They’re like us, too. And we’re going to break someone out of prison, but we need your help.”

“You still haven’t told us what’s in it for us,” Peter sing-songed. In less than a heartbeat, he was leaning against the doorframe, backing Wendy up. Jean couldn’t help but smile; she hadn’t seen them together often, they’d gone on to lead very different lives, Peter as one of the X-Men, Wendy pursuing her own kind of normality, but when they had, it was impossible to mistake the way they revolved around each other, a binary star system, closer and harder to tell apart, save for their powers, than identical twins. “ _Us_ since I’m guessing that _you’ve_ guessed we’re a package deal. Come on, is it money? It’d have to be a lot of money.”

Jean looked at Wendy. _Would you like,_ she projected, _to meet your father?_

Wendy stared at her. She’d always been resistant to telepathic intrusion, but paradoxically, the Phoenix had been drawn to her, had memorized the shape of her mind, and so it was easy enough to speak now, even when Jean’s mental powers had been largely crippled. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll do it.”

Peter started. “We will?”

Wendy shot him a _Tell you later_ look and he subsisted.

“Don’t worry, Peter,” Jean said. “There’s something in it for you, too. _You_ get to break into the Pentagon.”

Peter brightened like the sun coming up, Wendy rolled her eyes, and Jean smiled. For now, they were brilliantly, sparkling alive, and that was enough.

— ⓧ —

Peter and Wendy were by far the most alert, inventive, and enthusiastic of the lot of them—Peter surprisingly adept at reading blueprints, and Wendy’s powers not having settled to the point where anything was out of her reach if she tried hard enough—and the plan came together with minimal support from the men that she’d been sent through time to find. Jean shrugged it off and only hoped that they would become more useful once they actually had Erik in their grasp.

Alex, they decided, would be the getaway driver, because his powers were not exactly conducive to stealth, or really anything other than bringing the entire building down on their heads. Hank would disrupt the security systems (”How?” he’d asked, and Jean had shrugged, “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” and Hank had seemed both offended and flattered that she’d apparently come to expect him to whip up technological solutions from thin air). Peter and Wendy would take care of the guards and the actual break-out, and Charles insisted that he and Jean would meet them at the edge of the no-metal zone, apparently because he had no faith that Erik wouldn’t simply kill them and escape himself. Jean had merely shrugged at this notion and told them that maybe it _was_ best that they stick to the no-metal policy until he’d seen that they were on his side.

“What about comm units?” Jean asked Hank, and when he looked at her blankly, she just sighed. “Never mind.”

It was fun, actually, planning a mission where the chances of death were still present, but not _omnipresent_ , not the way planning assaults against the Sentinels was steeped in death and acceptable sacrifice. It felt like if she looked over her left shoulder she would see Scott, over her right Ororo, and know that they had her back; but when she looked over her shoulder, all she saw was absences. Scott laid up in a medical wing and Ororo lying broken at the bottom of the Yellowstone Caldera, and all the people who had vanished in between.

At one point, Charles pulled her aside and hissed, “I don’t know that I’m totally comfortable with using what amounts to _child soldiers_ ,” and Jean had laughed so hard that her hair shook out of its high ponytail.

— ⓧ —

They entered separately—Jean was a little too old to pass convincingly for Charles’s, Hank’s, or Alex’s date, and wasn’t that a trip—and converged at a tour group being led by a perky young woman whose glazed eyes betrayed the number of times she’d given this exact talk before. Charles still looked scraggly in the suit Hank and Alex had stuffed him into, but, well—it was 1968, right? Surely it wasn’t precisely _unusual_ for professional men to also look vaguely stoned out of their minds. They split off at the first service corridor, leaving Hank to stay with the group—the broadcast signal he’d boosted would work from anywhere within the Pentagon’s walls, he assured them—while they skittered down a hallway.

“Where are they now?” Charles hissed at her.

Jean closed her eyes and cast out her mind—  
  
  
  
“You don’t see me,” Wendy whispered, peeking out at a hall full of guards, and just like that—they didn’t.  
  
  
  
“Is she telepathic?” Charles asked, startled.

“Not… exactly,” Jean said through gritted teeth, straining with the effort of holding onto her mind.  
  
  
  
Peter grinned at the guard holding the tray of spinach-and-gruel mush and held up a roll of duct tape.  
  
  
  
A quick-talking group of men in suits passed her; she struggled to smooth over her expression and smile, to look like a diplomat and her attaché and absolutely not like a pair of rogue mutants breaking into the Pentagon to free a declared terrorist. When they were gone, she refocused again—on Peter, fascinated, handling the heavy plastic baton before sliding it into its sheath, on Wendy’s sharp eyes landing on the plastic guns holstered in the line of ten guards down the hall, of her curious thought, _Ten and more men for one prisoner?—_  
  
  
  
Wendy strode confidently behind her brother, the guards’ eyes slipping away right before they saw her, to an errant fly, to scratch a mild itch—a thousand little probabilities that shouldn’t have come spilling one after the other but did anyway.  
  
  
  
Stunted as her powers were, Jean could still feel the minds of mutants a little differently than the minds of humans. So she was only a little startled when Hank, out of breath and absolutely _not where he was supposed to be_ , rushed up behind them and said, in a rush, hoping to get out his message before his tourist garb looked too out of place, “We have a problem.”  
  
  
  
A plastic baton digging into Peter’s chest, “Aren’t you a little young to work at the Pentagon?” someone growled—

—and Wendy grasped his shirtfront and hissed, “Who are _you_ calling young?” and, dazed, he let them go on their way, looking at his hands like he’d never seen them before—  
  
  
  
“It’s the device,” Hank said. “I’m picking up on someone else’s interference. _Someone else_ is tampering with the surveillance right now—I’m not sure how, they’re not doing it the same way as I am—listen, something else is happening right now, this is a bad time to be doing this—”

But one of the dangers telepathy now had for Jean was that it was so easy for her to become lost when she rode along in someone else’s mind, her own mental strength not enough to sustain her sense of self, and that was what happened now, as she seemed to dissolve in Wendy’s mind. Through the revolving door, down the corridor into a room roofed over with glass—but there were doors on the ground level as well—what did they lead to?—and Wendy’s bright, magpielike mind focused on the man crumpled on a bare mattress, his paper-grey clothes, his light, darting eyes so very much like her own—  
  
  
  
Peter rapped on the glass and the man looked up, startled. Wendy smiled at him, pressed her lips to the glass, and whispered, “ _Disappear_ —”  
  
  
  
—and it did—  
  
  
  
“Jean,” Charles was saying, “Jean!” He shook her, and abruptly her mind snapped back to her body like a rubber band stretched taut. It hurt like a rubber band snapping back, too, and she rubbed at her head irritably while Charles said, fast, panicked, “Did you hear that? Something else is going on, we need to abort the mission—”

Her mind came back to her slowly, in concentric circles. One of the last things to return was her mutant-sense, her mental map of the mutant minds in the vicinity. Stunted as her powers were, Jean could still feel the minds of mutants a little differently—especially mutants that she’d encountered before—but it had been so long since she’d felt this mind, and the last she’d felt of it had been it snapping and splintering under the heel of a Sentinel. She cocked her head at the sense of it, closing in. “Mystique?” she murmured.

And then the cool press of a gun to the back of her head.

“Don’t try to stop me,” said a woman’s voice. Not Mystique’s… not that that counted for anything. “I’m getting Erik the hell out of here, and nothing you can say will change my mind. So turn around right now, Charles… and I’ll let you live.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	7. 1963: 11/22/63

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1963.

Erik hadn’t been home in weeks, and he was getting irritated.

Even though Charles reached out every night with Cerebro, no matter how tired he was from the hunt for his prey ( _honestly, Erik, you make it sound so awful and sordid_ ) of new students, and brushed against his mind in gentle commiseration, even though the friends he was closest to accompanied him on missions, he was stricken with a homesickness all the more painful because of how foreign it was. He missed _everything_. The never-ending fight to renovate the mansion even further than their brief stint at basic training before Cuba for the new students, the way the younger crowd (though they wouldn’t be able to call them that for much longer, with the elementary-age students streaming through the doors) often created more messes in their attempts to help with the renovations, Hank’s endless list of tasks to refine their powers or just his pet projects—the cheerful chaos of his new life brimmed over in a way that he hadn’t even been able to imagine before Charles Xavier.

It was strange, considering what Erik Lehnsherr, feared Nazi hunter, would think of the person he’d become. He’d lived for years without a home, without anything more than a series of bases that were more flophouse than safehouse. He rarely returned to the same country more often than once every few years, if only to give the memories of law enforcement time to cool off and forget him, much less the same town. Charles had changed all of that, in much the same way he’d changed everything else about his life.

What he hadn’t changed—what not even Charles, amazing, extraordinary Charles could make better just by wishing it so—was that the world would eat them alive, a new species, a vulnerable type of human, if they let it. So he and Mystique and Azazel and Riptide and Angel and Banshee, the select of them who had believed not in Shaw but in his efforts on behalf of mutantkind, were called away more often than he would like. To government facilities, to research bases, to liberate children that he would send along to Charles and adults that he would give the option of hiding or fighting. They’d struck and eliminated two bases already, and Erik had pulled down the struts of the building around the ears of the humans working there. He’d only killed three men over the course of those missions, only tortured one. Charles was making him soft in more ways than one, and he couldn’t even bring himself to regret it.

But now they were on the trail of something big. Something important. Mystique had caught the _Kommandant_ burning documents in the hidden offices of the last facility, and Azazel’s tail had whipped around and severed the man’s hand, but not before most of the papers had curdled into ash in Raven’s hands. The few fragments they had managed to scavenge intact had brought them not to a facility torturing mutants but a hastily abandoned base carved into the Denver mountainside. The organization they were following wasn’t military, not exactly, but they were at a loss as to who, whether working for a private or governmental group, could rustle up the resources to conceal something of this scale, until—

Erik paused out in the snow as he did a last perimeter check. Ash spread everywhere, another sign that the humans had known they were coming and acted accordingly, that whatever was being plotted had been birthed in absolute secrecy and needed to remain that way, even from a handful of ill-connected mutants. It brought bad memories to mind, fading now under Charles’s ministrations, but still there. But under his boot was a fairly intact manila folder. Its contents were gone, scattered to the wind, but he recognized the seal printed on the front. He’d lived in a building with the seal built into the floor for weeks.

“CIA,” he said brusquely, slamming down the folder fragment onto the table with a knife wielded by his powers, when he returned to the hovel he was sharing with the other members of the offensive arm of the new mutant civilization he and Charles were building.

“Oh, good,” Banshee said. “That’ll help with the surprise we have for you.”

Angel opened the door to the hidden room in the back. Tied to a chair and gagged with his own hat was a CIA agent dressed warmly for the snow outside—high-ranking if the nondescript suit said anything.

Erik smiled. “Oh, look. You got me my favorite.”

When he _worked_ , he built careful walls to keep Charles out. It was late, later in Westchester, Charles was probably asleep—but when they were together they were so intertwined in each other that Erik worried that Charles might seek him out, even in dreams, and _see._ It wasn’t that Charles didn’t know what he did, what he sometimes had to do, it wasn’t even that Charles had asked to be shielded from that part of their missions. It was that Erik didn’t want Charles, lovely bright Charles, anywhere near the screams and pleading. He constructed compartments in his mind, keeping Charles safely in the light—what light there was—and everything else… where it ought to be.

Charles always wondered why he never woke up during Erik’s nightmares.

Finally, the man he was working over sobbed out a location. Dallas.

As he cleaned the blood off himself, Mystique held up a newspaper: “KENNEDY TO TOUR TEXAS: SAN ANTONIO, HOUSTON, DALLAS, AUSTIN.” “That’s what they must be after,” she said briskly. “The noise, the crowds… if they staged an attack by mutants on the motorcade, it would be pandemonium.”

Erik shook his head. “Impossible. He was talking about a single asset who’d been cultivated as a CIA patsy for months; he’d need much more firepower in order to stage an attack like the one you’re talking about. Likelier that he’s planning an assassination. Somebody in Kennedy’s retinue who’s supportive of mutant rights, somebody high-ranking.”

“How will we figure out who?” she said plaintively.

“We don’t,” Erik said. “We just need to stop the man with the gun.”

Azazel brought them to Dallas early on the 21st and they spent the morning and afternoon scouting the motorcade route, rooting out the best sniper’s nests and blind corners. Mystique and Angel were picking up the world of physical violence quickly, which made Erik feel—strange. “The children,” Charles had called the young mutants they’d gathered together once. But they weren’t children, not really. Angel was worldlier than Charles had been, in spite of his put-upon affectation of cosmopolitan grace. And Mystique was a quick, voracious student, but loyal and dedicated in a way that made her his most valuable lieutenant, his confidante, his second, the way Emma Frost had been Shaw’s. 

That evening, he reached out with his mind, and felt the faintest, sweetest whisper of Charles’s against his. They couldn’t speak like this over such a long distance—all he could get was a faint glimpse of exhaustion, the way Charles’s mind appeared burnt and fuzzy at the edges like it did when he’d been using Cerebro again. Erik pushed a faint moue of disapproval at him and felt Charles’s answering amusement.

Tomorrow, Erik decided. They’d finish whatever this was tomorrow, and he’d be back in time to kiss Charles awake. He’d make sure of it.

— ⓧ —

They stationed Erik at the most vulnerable stretch of the motorcade route. It would be his job to feel out the shape of any gun that seemed different from the standard-issue weapons the Secret Servicemen were carrying. It was a daunting task—there was _so much_ metal there, zippers and earrings and cars and JFK pins, he couldn’t focus on it all at once, he had to sweep his consciousness constantly over the crowd searching out a familiar outline of steel and aluminum.

He wondered if Charles was watching on the television; he saw cameras winking out of the corner of his eye. He liked to think of it as a small Cerebro, sweeping over the crowd, Charles perhaps catching a glimpse of the curve of his jaw, the part of his hair, before he vanished, swallowed into the mass, every face unique and in that way all of them indistinguishable.

It was dangerous, being so out in the open. It would be a perfect opportunity to take them down; they were strong together, but only Erik, and perhaps Mystique, with the fervor with which she’d thrown herself into combat training, might be able to stand against a concerted effort to divide and conquer them. Azazel knew where they were stationed, in case they needed a quick getaway, but there was no way of quickly communicating to him changes of position, and of course he couldn’t exactly blend into the crowd. Angel and Banshee up high, Riptide and Mystique at either end of the motorcade, and Erik sweeping the crowd; their powers weren’t exactly subtle, not in the way Erik’s was; difficult, if not impossible, to use in a crowd. It wasn’t enough, not to stop an assassination attempt against perhaps a high-ranking adviser, maybe even the governor, but it was all they had. 

And once they found out who they were protecting, they might also find an ally in high places. It would be worth it. To know that the whole world was not, in fact, against them—it would be worth it.

It was Erik who felt it first. The assembly of pieces of a bolt-action rifle, cool metal in their carrying case, barrels interlocking and snapping into place. He shoved through the crowd until he got to Mystique, who looked like a respectable older version of herself in her netted hat and neatly turned-out skirt suit. “School Book Depository,” he said lowly, and she nodded briskly. He moved in that direction as she broke from him and headed towards where Angel and Banshee were perched; if they could fly over discreetly, they could back Erik up, but he wouldn’t count on it. He never had.

He never made it there.

The building was in sight when a man grabbed his arm and dragged him to a standstill. “Sorry, Mr. Lehnsherr,” purred an unfamiliar voice, “but this operation is too delicate to allow you and your little mutant band of fighters to interfere.”

Panic swept through him. They knew his _name_. What about Charles—what about the _school—_ if they suspected he was still working with the other mutants, surely Charles was in danger as well, he had to warn him, he had to _tell him_ —

Later, he would realize that the earth-shaking fear that had swept through him had worked like a mental shout, amplifying his desire to speak to Charles many hundreds of miles until Charles had jerked to attention in front of a biology classroom with Erik’s panic in his eyes and heart. Now, though, he merely grasped the man by the collar and dragged him into an alley, calling up the knife in his boot to press against his jugular. Infuriatingly, the man displayed no fear. Well-trained, then, but Erik had carved his reputation through Nazi commandos and high-ranking officers alike; he knew that everyone had a breaking point, even for a filthy mutant Jew. “Who is it?” he snarled. “Who are you planning to kill today?”

The man merely laughed. Fine. Erik tried a trick for which Hank had inadvertently given him the idea when he’d pointed out the iron content in blood—he reached _inside_ the man’s body and squeezed, concentrating on the diffuse nature of the iron molecules bound to particles of blood, like a fine metal mist inside every human—and pulled.

The man screamed. Hastily, Erik muffled him with his arm; they were in an empty alley now, but the crowd was mere feet away. “Who?” he demanded. “Tell me or I won’t just kill you, I’ll rip the iron straight out of your blood.”

“The bitch—Kennedy’s wife—”

Erik almost lost his grip on the man’s shirtfront. “The First Lady?”

“Mutant scum,” the man spat. “She’ll sway him—make the world unsafe for the rest of us—”

He shoved him down and took the knife from where it was floating in the air, but before he could slash his throat, the man laughed again, more of a hacking sob now that there was blood in his lungs from where Erik had perhaps not been as careful as he should’ve. “We’ve been keeping an eye out for you—you and your gene-freak friends—you won’t be able to save her—kill him now—”

Erik spun around and reached on instinct for the gun the man behind him was holding, but his metal-sense slipped past it like water on oil; he fired, and only sheer dumb luck, and perhaps the inherent inaccuracy of plastic guns, kept Erik from being splattered all over that alleyway. With a thought, he sent the knife slicing through the throats of first the immediate threat in front of him and then the gasping, already-dying man he’d tortured behind him, and then he was back in the crowd, hoping he hadn’t gotten too much blood on him, trying to decide whether he could make it to the Book Depository in time or if he could find Mystique, Angel, Riptide— _warn_ them, take them all and disappear, hole up back in the mansion and wait, like Charles, for the world to come to them.

He wanted. Oh, he wanted nothing more than to retreat, to curl up in Charles’s arms and shake off the way they’d _known his name,_ known his people, might have even known about his heart, secreted safely away in Westchester, or so he’d thought.

But his damn conscience. And his damn Charles Xavier, for waking it up after so long sleeping.

He elbowed his way through the crowd, sifting frantically through the metal around him—the man in the alley had had a plastic gun, but the assassin had an actual rifle. He’d lost track of it during the alley scuffle, but he reached out again, desperately scanning the floors of the Book Depository—there was a man with a gun, Secret Service-issue, on the fifth floor—with a rush of rage, Erik realized that they must be in on it. A plot to assassinate the President’s wife? Of course for it to succeed, the CIA, the Secret Service, the people who were meant to _protect her_ , had to stand aside and allow it to happen, or worse, orchestrate it themselves. On instinct, he took control of the gun and blew away the man stationed on the fifth floor. Now to find the assassin—

A rush of horror, not his own, flooded through him. _Charles_ , he thought, and for a moment they seemed to stare at each other across a great divide, all those lives, all those miles between them narrowed down to a point of nothing.

 _I’m sorry_ , he thought, and _I love you_ , and he shoved him out of his mind, not in that order. He didn’t want Charles to see what happened next, whatever happened next—a murder he was responsible for, or his own death. He built walls quickly, thick cinderblock constructions that he could just barely feel Charles on the outside of, bouncing against the defenses in his head. _Sorry_ , he thought again, _love you_ , but he knew that Charles wouldn’t hear him this time, if he’d heard him before. 

It had to be worth it. He had to make it worth it. He refocused on his search for the assassin.

Around him, men in dark suits were closing in. They had their hands at their waists, reaching for plastic guns in plastic holsters, but that was fine—he had to find the assassin—finally, one floor up, he caught a sense of the metal seams and rivets of the rifle, just as the crowd around him cheered, just as the President’s motorcade arrived. The rifle, steady in its position, as it followed that coiffed head of hair—

The flash of the bullet—

Erik grasped it and _pulled_ —

A searing pain lanced across his head and he collapsed. _Ceramic bullets from a plastic gun,_ he thought, just as the world around him burst into screams. And then everything went dark.

— ⓧ —

Eventually, the US government has its revenge for the eighty seconds during which its own navy's missiles had been pointed against them.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	8. 1968: Outside

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1968.

“Raven,” Charles breathed.

Behind her, Mystique’s gun dug harder into the back of Jean’s head. She wasn’t quite concerned; she could sense killing intent from miles away, and Mystique had none, and besides, her telekinesis could take care of the gun, but time was swiftly getting away from them and being thwarted in their attempt to break out Magneto by _someone else_ also attempting to break out Magneto was, frankly, too absurd to be borne. “Charles,” Mystique said brusquely. “You look… awful.”

“Raven, what are you doing?” Charles pleaded, having completely forgotten the purpose of the mission. Jean rolled her eyes and concentrated on Peter and Wendy, who were—  
  
  
  
—watching as the man she recognized as Magneto pulled himself up to the level where they were standing with difficulty, wincing around his wounds. “Who are you?” he demanded, though not hostilely, more in the manner of a wary animal circling around the idea of kindness.

“Peter and Wendy,” Peter said cheerfully, “and we’re here to fly you away.”  
  
  
  
“I’m here to break out Erik,” Mystique said. “And you can turn around right now and leave without getting hurt, or I can make you, because I’ve been planning this for months and I’m _not_ going to let your little—whatever this is—allow him to languish in prison for one more moment.”

“Mystique,” Jean interrupted, “we’re here to break out Magneto as well.”

Mystique’s gun faltered; not quite the killing machine that Jean was used to, then. Everyone here was not quite what she was used to them being. “What?”

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Jean said quickly, “our allies have already gotten him out of his cell, they’re headed this way—”  
  
  
  
—"In less than a minute, those doors are going to open, and twenty guards will be here to kill us,” Magneto warned mildly, like he was totally unconcerned about the possibility. 

“No,” Wendy said, “they won’t.”  
  
  
  
“You told me he was a monster,” Mystique told Charles. “Irredeemable.”

“That’s not,” he said through gritted teeth, “what I said.”

“It’s what you meant.”

“Monster or not,” Charles said, “we need him. So you can help us, or—” he cut himself off, obviously not having been prepared to finish that sentence, and Mystique knew it. Jean could hear the way her lips curled in a grim smile.

“I heard about the school,” she said. “So what could you possibly need him for, Charles? Why are you standing? Why aren’t you,” she said to Hank, “blue? And why haven’t you just frozen me yet?”

“I don’t… have my powers right now,” Charles said uncomfortably.

“And you’ve miraculously gotten your legs back. What happened to mutant and proud, Charles?” Jean could feel Mystique shake her head slowly, the bitterness suffusing her voice like over-steeped tea. “And just when I thought you’d run out of ways to betray us.”

She was going to move, Jean could feel it, not to kill them, but to knock them out and leave them here to be captured by the military, probably, though Magneto, knowing what happened to mutants within these walls, would likely insist on bringing them with them. And that was one way, she supposed, of getting him free. She could feel Wendy stepping into the hallway full of guards, saying before they could react, “You don’t see _him_ either,” and the three of them in a little procession down the hallway, Peter holding the door open for them, Wendy with her hand in Magneto’s to maintain the spell, casting little glances at him out of the corner of her eyes, sizing up his cheekbones, his intensity, all the little parts of herself and Peter she’d never known the origin of. Jean reached out with her telekinesis and knocked the gun out of Mystique’s hand; Mystique lunged at her on instinct. She’d never needed a gun, after all; her body was her first and finest weapon. But Jean seized onto her mind and _pushed._

It was easier this time, without whatever interference had been keeping her from reaching Charles. She chose one or two memories—Mystique smiling at her as they trained the new recruits together, Mystique facing down a Sentinel by herself, Forge saying, _“It’s a time machine”—_  
  
  
  
“Stop them!” shouted someone, and Wendy spun around, startled—the guard Peter had taped to the wall, still in his undershirt and boxers but he’d gotten his mouth free somehow and was wriggling madly in his bonds, and even her power wasn’t strong enough to resist a clear sign that something was wrong like that. At once, they noticed the prisoner and the two children in their midst, and Peter grabbed them both by the napes of their necks and _ran_ as they lifted their plastic guns and aimed—  
  
  
  
The memories poured out of her—the Professor telling her, _“If you arrive before 1963, you can save him, Jean”—_  
  
  
  
Wendy slammed the button on the service elevator—  
  
  
  
_“My name is Jean Grey. I’m a mutant. I come from the future, and I need your help—”_  
  
  
  
The alarms blaring, but a whispered word and whatever they might do to lock down the elevator was disabled; Peter shuffling next to her, and she could tell that he wanted to be running; her father (her father!) blank-faced and still as he stared at the glossy silver doors—she wondered what had happened to him to make him so statue-like, so impenetrable—  
  
  
  
Scott pressing a kiss to her forehead, his good eye closed, whispering, _“Be safe, Jean Grey”_ —  
  
  
  
And the elevator doors opened and _they weren’t there_ , they were supposed to meet them at the service entrance, but no one was there, and the guards were closing in on them and any moment they’d be surrounded and maybe Peter could take them all but maybe he couldn’t—  
  
  
  
Jean ripped herself from Mystique’s mind. Mystique— _Raven_ —reeled back, but Jean was already casting her mind, her sore, aching mind, around for Wendy’s. _Here_ , she shoved at her, and instead of impressing a map upon her vision, which she wasn’t sure she had the fine control for anyway, she imbued Wendy with a persistent tug to their location. She could feel Wendy grab the hands of the boy on her left and the man on her right and tug them along, a compass needle pointing north.

“They’re coming,” she gasped, and Raven looked up at her, tears glittering in eyes that had gone yellow. Behind her, Charles had rushed forward to support his—sister? _Really?—_ but Raven pushed him off impatiently and turned on her heel.

“Let’s go,” she said, and led the way back to the service elevators, Hank following dazedly in her wake and Jean rubbing her pounding head. No telepathy for her, at least for a while—she’d exhausted herself today, with the unexpected need to trust Raven with the truth and guide Wendy and the others out.

“Raven,” Charles said. “No killing today, all right?” And Raven stiffened and gave Charles a cold, considering look. But she nodded.

They ran into each other as they rounded the last corner to the elevator bank. A complicated expression passed over Magneto’s face as he surveyed them—Jean, who would be a stranger to him, Hank, Raven… and Charles. They had to move, they had to go _now_ , Wendy’s urgency was still pounding at Jean’s mind where she was still connected to her, but Charles and Magneto just… stared at each other, and it seemed that for them time had lost all meaning, as Charles drew closer, and closer—

—and punched Magneto in the face—

Hank grabbed him and hauled him backwards and Jean elbowed her way in between them. Peter’s eyes were round as coins. “I suppose I have even more of a reason to ask what you’re doing here, Charles,” Magneto drawled. “And… walking.”

“Ask later,” Raven snapped, but she softened when she looked at Magneto, reached out a hand that might have been perfectly steady save for the way she hesitated to touch his sleeve. Magneto took her hand and smiled at her, and Jean remembered abruptly that they’d founded the Brotherhood together, though when she’d known it, Mystique had been commanding it by herself for decades. Charles was staring at them with—something indecipherable written across his face. Agony? Disgust? Fury? Deciding that she didn’t want to risk a repeat of the punch, she took him by the elbow and dragged him in the direction of the emergency exit that they’d marked out as their escape hatch.

“Come on,” she said, and Raven shook herself out of it and began to hustle them along with equal fervor. Still, their little group seemed to instinctively surround, like a river parting around a rock, an island of space that only Charles and Magneto—Erik, she supposed she should call him, young as he was—occupied.

Charles kept giving furtive glances over his shoulder where Erik was taking long, loping strides behind him, as if to assure himself—or remind himself?—that Erik was really there, and Erik—Erik hadn’t stopped staring at Charles since he’d first seen him. A bruise was beginning to form high on his cheek, but he didn’t even seem to notice. As they moved, he said quietly, like he couldn’t bear to wait until they were in a safe place for answers—or like a man who knew that there was no such thing as a safe place—”…What _are_ you doing here, Charles? How are you—your legs?”

“Hank invented something and I’m only here because _she_ ,” he nodded viciously in Jean’s direction, “says the future needs you. Personally, I have my doubts, but I was overruled.”

“The future?” Erik asked, baffled, but at that moment shouts echoed from one of the hallways behind them. Raven met Jean’s eyes, and she knew that the guards had finally caught up to them.

“Hurry,” Jean snapped, and spun to face them. Humans with guns; she knew what to do with humans with guns. Mystique stood at her elbow, backing her up. “Get them out,” she told Hank, who was both an adult and… not mixed up in whatever strange dynamic Erik and Charles had going for them. “Alex should be waiting for you outside.”

She turned back to face the incoming guards and heard the rush of feet moving off behind her. Mystique gave her an assessing look. “So, the future,” she said.

“Yeah,” Jean said, and tore the plastic gun from the grip of the guard holding it. Not so easy when he was up against a general telekinetic, was it.

Mystique delivered a kick to the face of another guard and wrested his gun from him, expertly stripping it and ejecting the cartridge of ceramic bullets, before she went after the next man. Barely out of breath, she said, “You and I know each other?”

“We used to.”

“Before I died.”

Jean nodded. The Mystique she knew had always been matter-of-fact about the cause and her own mortality, but now, this Raven stumbled, missing a beat, and Jean had to jam the gun of one of the guards so that Raven could knock it out of his hands. “Sorry,” she said, and they continued to fight in silence. When all the guards were down and they could hear no more coming, they took off back towards the exit where Alex should still be waiting for them in the Professor’s dirty old van.

“You look after them, then?” Raven asked. “Everyone I left behind.”

“Everyone who’s left,” Jean said. “I look after my family.”

Raven smiled a little sadly. “Yeah,” she said. “I get that.”

They burst out into the late-afternoon sunlight, and made a beeline to where Hank was frantically waving them into the van from its open door. The moment Jean swung inside, Raven having gone right before her, Alex was off, peeling out of the Pentagon’s parking lot in a squeal of burning rubber. Jean focused on the yellow barrier that had lowered to lock down the Pentagon when the alarm had gone off and lifted it; Alex tore past the shouting gate guards and within a moment they were on the highway, and then on DC’s back roads, taking the long route around the traffic cameras and speed traps back to the Maximoffs’ suburb.

Alex took a moment to focus on the not one but two women who had barged into his van. “Raven?!” he yelped as her disguise fell away, revealing her characteristic blue scales and red hair.

“Hey, Alex,” she said, and kissed his cheek. Hank made a strangled noise in the back of his throat.

Jean watched as guards gathered in the distance. On the highway, going the other way, they passed a truck with a familiar Trask Industries logo, and shuddered. _Someone walking on your grave_ , her mother had told her once. Did it count if it was the mass grave of everyone she’d ever loved?

— ⓧ —

They dropped Peter and Wendy off at a bus station halfway across town from their house. “Did you get what you wanted?” Jean asked them.

“No,” Peter said petulantly. Wendy looked more thoughtful.

“Maybe,” she said, stealing one last look at Erik, who didn’t notice; he was silently drinking Charles in, every contour of his face, every facet of his grimace. The evening was gathering around them, an unseasonal chill in the air. Jean tucked her hair out of her face as the sunset darkened to twilight and watched as the twins left, their shoulders bumping companionably, already bickering about something or other, and felt, again, the fragility and cruelty of youth.

When she clambered back into the van, Erik turned to look at her assessingly. She wondered what Charles had told him—nothing, probably, given the way he was gritting his teeth and seemed torn between staring at Erik and looking literally anywhere else—but when she met his gaze she felt a rush of relief and affection. His eyes. His eyes were the same. Hank and the Professor—they were so _innocent_ , they had no concept of what she had experienced and never could, not until it happened to them. But Erik. Erik could picture what she had lived through, what she had done. Erik was capable of imagining the horror that awaited them.

She wondered when that had begun to pass for comfort.

— ⓧ —

They didn’t bother to drive back to the mansion. The band on her wrist had begun to itch, and though she knew it was almost certainly psychosomatic, she couldn’t wait to be rid of its heaviness, its responsibility.

Instead, they pulled into a vacant lot about forty miles outside of the city. Aside from dropping off the Maximoffs, it was the first time they’d stopped to breathe since they’d pulled out of the Pentagon going seventy-five miles per hour. Jean looked up at the stars coming out overhead, mostly blunted and faded by the city lights in the distance, and waited as Charles, Hank, Alex, Raven, and finally Erik followed her outside.

“What have they told you about me?” she asked him.

“That you’re from the future,” Erik said skeptically.

She nodded. “2023, to be precise.” She took a deep breath and began her spiel; she’d never had to go over the trauma of how she lived so many times in her life—everyone in the future had lived it with her. She reflected that maybe they had grown quieter as a people with loss. “In forty-four years, the governments of the world will unleash Sentinels on the mutant population. They’re metal-based artificial intelligences programmed to hunt down mutants. For the last eleven years, we’ve been on the run. But we’re losing the war.” She shook her head. “We’ve _lost_ the war. This is a last-ditch effort. Hank—Hank as he will be in fifty-five years—sent me back here. For you.”

Erik stilled. “For me?”

“Yes,” Jean said, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Charles rub at his face and walk a few steps away, as if he couldn’t bear to face the reality of what he’d been a part of. “We need your power, Magneto. You’re the only one with the ability to stop a Sentinel without destroying it completely. We just need one—if we can dissect just one, figure out how it works, we might have a fighting chance. We might be able to rebuild our society. I was sent back in time for you, to bring you back to our time, so you can help us.”

“Why wouldn’t you just stop these… Sentinels from being built altogether?”

“I tried,” she said wearily. “It’s not a precise science. Beast and Forge told me that they couldn’t control _when_ I ended up, just that it would be sometime in the past. Hopefully some time I would be able to contact you, and pull you into the future.”

Erik was studying her. “You knew me. In the ‘future.’” 

“Yes,” she said, “I knew you,” and the words were so heavy with meaning, with grief, that she was sure that he’d heard everything she hadn’t said: You taught me as much as the Professor did. When you died, part of our spirit died with you. Part of _his_ spirit died with you, and part of mine. 

“Charles,” Erik said, startling her—startling everyone, it seemed, including Charles who tripped over his own feet and spun around, that hard mask that he’d been wearing since he’d seen Erik for the first time in five years slipping over his face again. “Do you believe this?”

“Why are you asking _me_?”

“I trust you,” Erik said simply.

Charles snorted. “Oh, you do?”

“Yes,” Erik said, and the serene surety of his voice seemed to crack open Charles’s facade.

“I believe it,” he said, not soft, exactly, but not hard and brittle as he had been, either.

“She’s not lying?”

Charles seemed to realize what Erik wanted from him, and his face—did something strange, contorted into something between pain and anger. “I don’t have my powers,” he said, clipped. “But she’s a telepath as well, and as far as I can tell, she’s not lying.”

“Why don’t you have your powers?” Erik said, concern deepening his voice.

“I traded them away so I can walk. Or so I can sleep,” Charles snapped. “Take your pick.”

And he turned again, storming off until he was several paces away, at the front of the van while the rest of them were standing at the back. Erik stared after him, expressionless, until Raven touched his shoulder gently and said, “Erik.”

Slowly, slowly, he turned back to look at Jean. “How do we do this?” he said.

Her shoulders slumped in pure relief. She hadn’t realized how terrified she was that he would say no, that he wouldn’t believe her, that she would have to—what? Knock him out and abduct him to the future? Somehow, even though he was brooding ten feet away, she suspected Charles would have something to say to that.

“My wristband is calibrated to transfer us back to my time,” she explained. She moved toward him. “We’ll end up in the star chamber I was sent from—”

“No,” Charles snapped, storming back into their little circle. “I’m going with you.”

“What?” Jean said.

“What,” Erik said.

“You’re not leaving my sight,” Charles said to Erik, every inch of him radiating cold determination. “As soon as this is over, I’m making sure you go right back to prison. It’s where you belong.”

Erik flinched. And Charles… didn’t know, Jean realized.

But she had other things to do than enlighten him. “Did you miss the part where the future is a desolate wasteland where you could be killed at any moment?” she asked.

“I’m going, and that’s final,” Charles said, cool as glacier ice, and something in her must have been hardwired to respond to that tone when it came from the mouth of the man who would become her Professor, because she nodded before she’d realized what she was doing.

“I’m going, too,” Raven said, and when Erik turned to her, startled, she smiled in a way that crinkled the scales around her eyes and said, “Somebody has to watch your back.”

“Alex comes too,” Jean said.

“What?!” Alex said. “Why?”

Hank looked around nervously and she could see him prepare to volunteer, though it was clear that was the absolute last thing he wanted to do. “At least one of you should stay,” she said gently. “Hank—if anyone can create a device that gets them back from the future in case I can’t, it’s you. Stay. And hopefully they’ll be back before you know it.”

Charles turned to look at him and seemed to notice how pale he was, how close he looked to passing out. “Stay, Hank,” he said, finally gentling into the man she almost recognized. “She has a point.”

“O-okay,” Hank said hesitantly, and backed up a little out of the circle they’d made that was growing tighter and tighter. That settled, there was a brief lull when Alex and Charles took a moment to pat him on the back and say encouraging words, though they only succeeded in making him look sicker. When Charles stepped back to let Alex have his turn, Jean turned to him, and said quietly enough that Erik couldn’t hear (Mystique, with her mildly enhanced hearing, might be able), “Why did you really insist on going?”

“I told you,” Charles said briskly. “I’m making sure he gets back where he belongs.”

“Then why did you warn him?” she pointed out. “If you really don’t want him to escape… why tell him that you’re going to send him right back to prison?”

Charles didn’t get a chance to answer. Alex, who still looked confused but game, returned to their circle. Jean held out her wrist, and hesitantly, first Raven, then Alex, then Erik, then Charles touched the band, the clunky black circle that she’d been carrying around for over a day. Jean’s heart was in her throat; she could hear it pounding.

She signaled the time machine and tried not to gasp like a drowning woman as 2023 rushed back in around her.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	9. 1990: Genesis

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1990.

Twenty-seven years after his capture, he feels it. A glimmer of metal at the edge of his consciousness.

It’s not a mistake, he realizes after a moment. It’s the innards of the detector stationed at the very edge of the no-metal zone. Slowly, like moving through syrup, he comes to realize that his range has expanded over the years—naturally, his mind seeking metal when denied it—like a man who’s suffered sensory deprivation who has become hypersensitive, who screams when silk brushes his skin. And it hurts, it does. It’s bright as snow-blindness, as hot as hellfire, but it is beautiful, and perfect, and for what he can now tell is two days, he lies there on his cot and soaks in the feeling of the copper and aluminum, the steel and titanium pressing against his mind.

On the third day, he summons a tiny filament of steel and snakes it along the corridors, following in the shadow of the guard who delivers his meals, a near-invisible glint at the edge of his boot, wound around his styrofoam tray. His eyes closed, unmoving, he plays with it, relearning the shape of metal, the scope of his own powers. He ties as many knots as he can and unties them. He melts the filament down and reforges it into something else. He bundles it together into a smooth round sphere of metal and wends it between his fingers, up and down, like he once did with Shaw’s coin.

On the sixth day, he tries moving the internal mechanics of the metal detector. Making it beep at odd intervals, memorizing the circuitry of a world he hasn’t been a part of in what must be decades by now. His senses are still growing, still growing—he can feel the steel-capped boots of the guards who man the metal detectors now, their standard Glocks and their pins and badges and various accoutrements. He can feel the natural magnetic vibrations of the earth around him, and he knows he is underground. He can feel the blood rushing through the veins of each guard and scientist, the ones who have long learned to ignore him because he is helpless and now old and tired.

On the seventh day, they come for him for their new experiments, and he kills them all.

— ⓧ —

The battle, if you can call it that, passes in a haze of blood and steel and brain matter splattered on the walls. He limps outside; the closer he gets to the surface, the more metal he can feel, and the harder he pulls, and the more destruction he leaves in his wake. He uses the wire he secreted days ago as a garotte, the steel he’s pulled from the detector as a shield for the ceramic bullets. When he can feel the steel girders of the building around them, he _yanks_ , and smiles as the screams begin as the building starts to collapse.

Rubble falls around him; it could crush him at any moment, but he doesn’t really mind. He steps around the corpses, killing anyone still moving, single-minded and relentless, and it’s not until he scrabbles outside and breathes fresh air for the first time in years, god, in decades that he realizes that he's been fighting toward freedom all along.

After what he will learn is twenty-seven years of captivity, he rather suspects he’s been driven mad.

— ⓧ —

He goes to get a hamburger.

— ⓧ —

In the clothes he stole on his rampage and chewing on a burger, as he watches the diner television, which is set to a station he’s never seen before, as a newscaster delivers rapidfire commentary about the disastrous collapse of the Pentagon that morning, he decides to kill the President.

Well, why not? He’s already served twenty-seven years for it. So what if the sentence usually comes after the crime?

He was never one for doing things strictly as they were supposed to happen, anyway. That was always—

— ⓧ —

Charles.

— ⓧ —

After so long, the memory of Charles is like a faded picture, worn white at the creases. Erik remembers that his eyes were blue, but not their precise shade; that he dimpled when he smiled, but not their exact location; that he moaned when you bit his neck, but not what it precisely sounded like. Erik thinks that sometime in the 70s, he tried to actively forget Charles. He remembers reading once, in _The Count of Monte Cristo, Il faut avoir voulu mourir, pour savoir combien il est bon de vivre._ We must have felt what it is to die that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.

The converse, he thinks, is also true. Only when you have felt breathing, blushing happiness are you capable of truly abject misery. The memory of Charles, of the joy they’d shared together, had haunted him, tormented his mind with what the years might have looked like if he had just not gone to Dallas that day, or even if he had simply died when that bullet grazed his head, until he had been unable to bear it, until he stopped thinking about Charles and the school and his lost, scattered friends at all.

He’d still kept up the walls in his head, though. Just… just in case.

He doesn’t have to anymore, he realizes now. He’s free. He can… he can…

What? What’s to say that Charles is even alive? But no, no, that’s unbearable, the thought that Erik has survived all these years against his will and Charles—and the descriptors he might’ve used for Charles (wonderful, loving, passionate) may all be gone now, lying fragmented among the memories he can’t dredge up for fear of destroying himself—had not, it is unacceptable. He pushes it out of his mind; he’s gotten good at that.

He leaves the shields up, but later, inspecting them, he will find a door that hadn’t been there before in his mental defenses. The heart, it seems, remembers.

— ⓧ —

He stops at a library and asks the woman behind the desk if she can look up Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. She gives him a strange look and uses what looks like the unholy child of an electric typewriter and a television set to pull up files about the school. “Do you want the tuition rates, or…?” she asks, but when she turns back to where the scruffy older man in the ill-fitting suit had been standing, he is already gone.

— ⓧ —

Somewhere in Westchester—

“Charles,” Hank says, “there’s… something you need to know about the Pentagon collapse.”

— ⓧ —

When Erik rips the RFK Stadium out of the ground and uses it to menace the White House, Charles closes his eyes to block out the image on the television screen and wheels to his office, where Jean, Scott, Ororo, and Peter are waiting, and gives the speech he hoped to never have to give in his lifetime.

In spite of himself—in spite of what Erik did to him—he somehow never thought he’d be giving it about _Erik._

“At this moment,” he tells them, “a mutant is on a course that will certainly reveal us to the world, and may result in that world turning against us. He has chosen the path of violence and is threatening the life of the President.”

“The President,” Scott says slowly. “Of… the United States.”

“Yes,” Charles says, and finds he can’t go on. 

Hank, bless him, carries on for him before the children can notice. “You’re the best—the very best—of the students we’ve trained here over the years.”

“Yes,” Charles rallies. “We hoped this day would never come, but now that it has… we have to ask you. To be the very best of us. To stop him if you can—and even if you can’t, to show the world that there is more to us than what Erik Lehnsherr would have us believe.”

Later, he will replay this moment in his mind; Peter’s start, the way he suddenly goes very still—Peter, who has never been still for longer than a nanosecond in his life. For now, though, he is consumed with memory—Erik’s laugh, his knowing knife-thin smile, the faintest hint of ginger in his hair—and preoccupied with not showing it, to the students or to Hank. “If I could fight myself, I would,” Charles says, and the way Ororo gives him a goggle-eyed look amuses him. These children, who have only ever known him as their patient pacifist professor, could barely imagine him in a flight suit on the beaches of Cuba, fighting to stop a World War. “But it’s one of the things beyond my reach now. I will not demand that you do this, children. I will only ask… and tell you that I truly believe that this is the best way forward for mutantkind. We can’t control his actions. But we can show the world that we control our own.”

Jean is looking at him, and he knows what she’s thinking—that he could, if he wanted to, control Erik’s actions. To slip into his mind, make him lower the stadium, apologize, and meekly hold out his hands for the handcuffs. To, if he tried hard enough, make everyone forget that anything but an unseasonal earthquake had ever happened to DC. But not only does it go against everything he stands for, Charles’s heart wrenches in two different directions at the thought—first, that he’s sworn he will _never_ try to get inside Erik’s mind again, and second, that even so, the thought of anybody tampering with Erik’s soul like that is… unbearable. Untenable. Abhorrent.

“Well?” he says.

“I need to call my sister,” Peter says. “But we’re game.”

— ⓧ —

Charles has never met Peter’s sister. While Peter, as a twenty-four-year-old deadbeat, had agreed to get his GED at the school, his twin sister, about whom Charles only knows that she is also a mutant, had graduated high school on time, gotten a degree, gotten a job in statistical analysis, and married a nice human—an entire mutant girl grown up while he had been wallowing in the years of the school’s hiatus. Peter insists that she’ll be able to help with the situation, and he trusts Peter in spite of himself, so he agrees. Wendy lives outside of DC herself, and meets them on the White House grounds, having somehow charmed her way past the cordon. 

Wendy’s mind is all spikes and shadows, and when he brushes her mind with Cerebro she turns an intelligent eye on him that makes him wonder if one of her gifts is telepathy and greets him, _Hello._ He rides along with them as they approach where the RFK stadium is hovering over the White House, and Erik is poised in the air—he can remember how joyous Erik was to discover that he could fly, how he thought loudly enough for Charles to hear even without telepathy that he _finally_ had a use for his powers that wasn’t killing—in the center of the concrete rings of seats. So it is that Charles’s first glimpse of Erik in twenty-seven years is through Ororo’s eyes.

He looks haggard, exhausted, and very thin. He is wearing an obviously stolen pair of suit pants and a white shirt rolled up to the sleeves, and the hated helmet, which he has somehow recovered, probably from when he broke out of the Pentagon in the first place. His face is twisted into an expression of rage and hatred that renders him almost unrecognizable; even against Shaw, who he hated with a purity unlike many emotions Charles had known, certainly purer than love, he wore a mask of calm at all times so as not to give Shaw any advantage over him. But he is still beautiful. God, he is still beautiful.

He is screaming for the President to come out and meet his fate, which is less beautiful, but so very… _Erik_ , the melodramatic bastard, that Charles can’t help the rush of affection that rises up in him. Twenty-seven years, it seems, had been enough to temper the anger and pain that had drive him so low when Erik had first betrayed him.

Ororo aims a crackling bolt of lightning at the back of his head, and Erik staggers. The stadium drops a few feet, but, screaming with effort, Jean keeps it aloft, lowering it slowly, slowly, in increments, toward the ground, so anyone below has the time to run. Scott joins in with a blast, but this time Erik is ready for him and summons a steel girder to reflect the beam off; it almost hits Peter, but he’s off, evacuating everyone under the stadium’s ever-growing shadow. Wendy raises her arms, faintly glowing with a red aura and—good _god-_ the entire stadium cracks and crumbles into tiny pieces, and with a sigh of relief Jean lowers them to the ground swiftly, placing them lightly down on the spots where civilians had been only moments ago, before Peter had gotten to them. 

Erik lands on the ground and faces them. “So,” he says softly, deadly, “this is what the Xavier School has become?” And he must know that Charles is listening to him through the eyes of his students, because he looks straight into Jean’s eyes and says, “A training ground for mutant commandos? Why, Charles. It looks like you’ve finally admitted I was right all along.”

 _Fuck off, Erik,_ Charles wants to say, but refuses to project it to these students who believe he is some kind of saint.

Scott, ever the brave one, steps forward. “We’re not commandos. We’re mutants who believe in Professor Xavier’s dream: that the strong can protect the innocent. Leave this place. The people here have done nothing to you.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, boy,” Erik says, and tears a metal beam out of the ground to wrap around Scott like a boa constrictor. Jean reaches for him and attempts to free Scott with her telekinesis, but Erik’s grip over metal is stronger than her control over all things. “I have been fighting for mutants since before you were born.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Peter calls, and oh, Charles is not prepared for _Peter Maximoff_ to make a speech, but it seems that’s what he’s doing. “You think this will protect mutants? Protect your family?”

 _“I have no family,”_ Erik snarls, and it hurts, it hurts, because for a brief, sparkling moment that wasn’t true. Charles is tempted to take the helmet off and lose himself in a bottle of scotch, like he did for all those years when Erik had first left him. But he won’t abandon his students. He’s stronger now. Erik made him that way.

“I thought my father was dead for the longest time,” Wendy says. Charles frowns at the non sequitur.

“Our mother, Magda, told us stories about him,” Peter adds. And that, of all things, seems to get through to Erik; he goes strangely still. What is _happening?_

“She said he could control metal, but not his own rage,” Wendy says, and no. No. _Impossible._

“She said he was the best man she ever met, and the most dangerous,” Peter says, a twinned singsong of Erik’s benedictions and sins.

“What are you saying,” Erik’s voice shakes.

“Don’t you know?” Peter says.

It makes sense. That’s the hell of it, that it _makes sense_. Wendy’s obvious power and Peter’s… _Peterness_ , the way he’s unbearably annoying and yet strangely charming in spite of that, the shadow that occasionally falls over his face when he seems older and wiser than his years—that’s Erik, that’s all Erik. Charles is shaking in Cerebro, and he desperately wants to take the helmet off and collect himself, and yet at the same time he can’t miss a moment of this, like watching a train crash in slow motion, or one of the telenovelas he refuses to admit that he marathons alone in his room on weekends.

“Maybe you’re not as clever as Mom thought you were,” Wendy says, and oh, he can see Erik in her now too, in her smirk, in her devilish charm. 

Ororo and Scott and Jean have stopped fighting and are staring at the show unfolding before them. They know Peter well, after all, and apparently he has hinted this to _none_ of them. “This is impossible,” Erik says, but sounding as though he doesn’t quite believe it himself. Charles knows what he sees: himself, reflected in the faces of children. It’s a sobering sight. Charles would know.

“This is your family,” Wendy says.

“Asking you to stop,” Peter adds.

“Asking you to be better than this.”

“For us. For mutantkind.”

Charles couldn’t have phrased it any better himself, and in fact probably would have phrased it many times worse. Erik stares at them for another long moment during which Charles fears for the children’s lives should he decide that they are lying to him—but they are _so young_ , surely Erik wouldn’t hurt them—

But he doesn’t really know Erik at all anymore, doesn’t he?

The point is driven home when Erik rises into the air, swiftly reaching a vanishing point on the horizon. Ororo or Jean could follow him, but Charles calls them back—he couldn’t have asked for a better outing for his students, with cameras rolling now, the situation resolved peacefully, and even Peter and Wendy demonstrating that one bad mutant seed far from represents the whole orchard. And—running away, Erik? He really isn’t the man Charles used to know.

— ⓧ —

It turns out Peter has known something about Erik that Charles never did, but what he and his sister don’t know—cannot know—is what their Professor and their father once were to each other. And it is this that comes to bite Charles in the ass when he feels a familiar mind—one that he could never forget, even after all these years—coming in fast and frantically the evening after the new X-Men save the President. He immediately slams his shields down—even the brief touch of Erik’s mind against his, not enough to get any sense of the state of it or his deeper thoughts, is like a tantalizing whiff of opium sweetness to an addict, and he’s left his junkie days long behind him. He’s not wearing his helmet, Charles realizes. Charles has just enough time to get to the back doorstep, even with the help of Hank’s advanced wheelchair prototype, when Erik crashes down like a meteor and collapses.

“Charles,” he says, his voice plaintive and so, so lost, “I don’t know what to… help me. Please. Help me.”

 _“Fuck,”_ Charles says, language he hasn’t used since the school was up and running again, and calls for Hank to help drag Erik inside.

— ⓧ —

The students don’t know. The students _can’t_ know. They’re jubilant over the creation of the X-Men, the way Ororo and Scott and Jean and Peter are being showered in praise, the joyous introduction of mutants to the world at large as heroes, not villains. They can’t possibly bear the hypocrisy of their Professor sheltering that villain hours after he sent his students in battle against him. So Charles sets up Erik on a cot in the attic and stations Hank there as a guard to stop any wayward phasing, technopathic, or delinquent children who may get around a precaution as simple as a lock. Hank isn’t happy about it, but once his strident argument with Charles about the wisdom of taking Erik in is over, he acquiesces, as Charles knew he would.

Erik is running a slight fever and he refuses to let Hank take his clothes off to examine him. Hank, rolling his eyes, gives him a bowl of cold compresses and storms off. He’s terribly thin, and Charles finds himself aching for him; did they—not give him enough to eat in prison? He doesn’t stop by to visit Erik often, but when he does, he always brings food. Jubilation went to culinary school and then decided to stay on as a cook, so the omelettes and casseroles and stews are hearty and top-notch, and Erik devours them. They don’t really speak to each other. Charles asks how he’s doing, and Erik nods or shakes his head, and then Charles leaves.

Hank reports that Erik spends most of his time looking out the window. At Hank’s insistence, he sits far enough back that he’s not visible from the grounds, but he watches the children avidly and avariciously. Hank is worried about it, but Charles isn’t—twenty-seven years might have passed, but Erik was barely fighting against the X-Men at the White House, and he suspects that Erik, still, would never hurt a single hair on a mutant child’s head. He thinks, rather, that he’s just captivated by fresh air and the open sky and the sheer _happiness_ of the students in their outdoor classes, in their play, in their mischief.

And that makes him ache, too, but he puts it out of his mind. Erik killed the President. Erik has spent close to the last three decades in prison because of it. Erik _deserved what he got._ Erik was always the one who believed in justice, and Charles always the one who believed in mercy, and Charles repeats it to himself now: justice, justice, justice, and Erik got what he wanted in the end.

Erik grows stronger, Erik grows quieter. And one night, when Charles brings him dinner, Erik says, softly, “You haven’t looked into my mind.”

Charles stiffens, straightens. “I’m never getting inside that head again,” he hisses. “This isn’t forgiveness. After what you’ve done… after what you just tried to do… no.”

“Then why did you take me in?” Erik asks, not angry, but just soft.

“Because I’m not like you!” Charles says, his voice raising to a near-shout. He swallows, pushes down the anger. He’ll frighten the children if he keeps going like this. “I don’t turn my back on the people I care about. Even long after they’ve forfeited that right.”

He ghosts away, listening hard to the silence behind him. Waiting for Erik to call out after him. Waiting, as he has been for years, for a reason to turn back. For something that will never come.

When he returns next, Erik is gone.

— ⓧ —

Erik finds the Brotherhood easily enough. When he touches down outside their latest headquarters, Mystique is waiting for him. Erik endures a hug, telling his limbs fiercely not to flinch away from the touch. Afterward, Mystique looks at him, and he sees the cool, assessing mask fall over her face, the way she sizes him up and, with disappointment, registers how broken he is, how tired he’s become. He looks at _her_ and sees the generalship she’s grown into, and feels the faintest hint of a smile—rusty, barely there—playing at the corner of his mouth.

His mind is scattered. He knows that this is a rare moment of lucidity, jarred into being when Charles had snapped at him, and he must act now, while he’s still clinging onto the fragments of reality. He tells her that she has done a good job, and will continue to do so in the future. He tells her that he’s proud of her. He tells her that he is leaving, and not to look for him. She listens gravely, without protesting, and only reaches out to squeeze his hand once he is done.

“What will you do?” she asks, a hint of plaintiveness in her tone, and for the first time he can see the girl she’d once been, the one who was so desperate to belong she’d laid in his bed and tried to tempt him with anything he wanted, the one who had never heard that she was beautiful. He feels as lost as that girl had once been, as adrift as a boat cut from its anchor.

“I don’t know,” he says.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	10. 2023: Now Entering the End of the World

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

When Charles opened his eyes in the future, the first thing he saw were the metal walls of the chamber Jean had described—the Star Chamber, she’d called it, and Charles had opened his mouth to make a _hilarious_ quip about sixteenth-century English courts and timestream decorum and only shut it when Raven had sent him a look so withering he _felt_ it even without telepathy—shaking so badly it seemed the girders and supports were going to come down around them. By his side, he felt Erik raise a hand to steady them, but if anything that made the walls come even closer to shaking apart; Jean grabbed his arm and Raven’s, and he reached out for Alex’s hand, and Raven latched onto Erik’s shoulder, and together like a conga line she hauled them all out through the round little door built into the sides of the chamber.

The second thing he saw was the cadre of people that had been surrounding the chamber and were now staring at them in hushed silence. Mutants, one and all—he saw Hank, now looking grizzled and worn, but having grown into his lionlike mane and mature features; the angry-looking man he and Erik had tried to recruit once, looking exactly the same as he had when they’d cornered him in that deeply disreputable bar; a woman with deep purple hair and another young woman with white streaks in her otherwise unremarkable brown braid, all of them wearing the same hardy leather getups as Jean was, all of them looking hungry, all of them looking closed-off and wary. A man wearing welding goggles hovered over the console crammed into the center of the room worriedly, flicking switches and hushing the time machine when it whistled or creaked.

The third thing he saw was the man in the back of the room. The one in the wheelchair.

Slowly, like sound returning after his ears popped on a plane or Hank’s serum wearing off, the volume of the crowd around him rose. Alex was standing stiffly at his elbow; Raven looked around warily, calculating friend or foe—she’d changed _so much_ —”Jeannie,” growled someone, and Jean said, tightly, “I’m sorry, Professor, I couldn’t get there in time,” and someone else said, “Is that—?” and yet another person whispered, “We knew it would be strange,” and blue-Hank said, “Welcome home, Jean—”

But the man in the back remained silent. He stared back at them—no, not at them. At Erik. Erik, who, like him, only had eyes for the man who must be Charles’s future self. Something passed between them, crackling—and Charles, absurdly, felt like an intruder, a sentiment that rippled out to the other mutants from the future in the room, who gradually fell silent, even before the man opened his mouth and said, in Charles’s precise English accent, “Please leave us.”

Jean tipped her chin up. “Come on,” she said to Alex, “there’s someone you need to meet.” He hesitated, looking back to Charles for direction, but he nodded, dazedly, hardly paying attention to Alex at all, too fixated on _whatever_ was going on between Erik and his future self—God, was this what it looked like when he and Erik had had mental conversations, back when the thing between them had been easy and unbroken? No wonder the children had made faces and backed away whenever they saw Erik and Charles communicating silently—and he found himself in the strange position of wishing he had his telepathy back, wishing that he could hear _Erik_ , both feelings that he’d forsworn years ago.

Slowly, the room emptied out. Only Raven hovered at the corners, looking as awkward as Charles felt, like a woman who hadn’t slept with and then betrayed or been betrayed by the other people in the room—which she _was_ , and Charles _wasn’t_ , and it was absurd for him to feel like he was intruding when if anything his future self was the one who didn’t belong—

Slowly, Old Charles wheeled toward him, his hands deft and calloused on the wheels. Erik swallowed as he watched him, looking more wrecked than he had when he’d seen Charles, his _own_ Charles— _not,_ he thought to himself furiously, that he was _his_ Charles anymore—for the first time in five years. He rolled to a stop in front of Erik, still fixated on him as though Charles and Raven weren’t even in the room, and reached up a trembling hand to caress his cheekbone with such tenderness that Charles felt almost like looking away from such a private, shattering moment. Erik didn’t flinch away, but the tension in his jaw, the way he swallowed, told Charles it was a near thing.

His future self stroked a long, ageworn finger down Erik’s cheek, smoothing away his spooked expression, and said, “My love. I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry that I’ve failed you so. If I could undo it, I would.”

And something _broke_ in Erik, Charles could feel it even without the telepathy, and in an instant he was on his knees on the hard concrete and sobbing, making wrecked, awful noises, and Charles reached out, on instinct, to draw him into his arms before he remembered like a splash of cold water that Erik was no longer a man he wanted to comfort, to heal. Raven got closer, her hand hovering over his shoulder, but it was Old Charles—Xavier? The Professor? all the names seemed too much, and yet not enough—who pulled Erik into his lap, dragging his fingers through Erik’s prison-short haircut, soft and soothing as a lullaby. 

A shock of guilt went through Charles—he knew that solitary confinement would have driven _him_ slowly insane, without the press of minds and emotions he’d grown so used to, but he hadn’t realized that it would have been so painful for Erik, Erik who’d been alone for so long, Erik who’d sought solitude as a defense from feeling. But he should have, of course—for Erik to go from love and acceptance, friendship and fellowship, from the warm press of Charles’s mind to _nothing_ , to the cold sterility of solitary—of course it would’ve been difficult.

But it had been _Erik_ who’d pushed Charles’s mind away, Erik who’d cast the final blow that shattered him. Charles remembered once thinking that nothing Erik could do would keep them apart, not forever. He was older now, though, and slowly, painstakingly, reconstructed the emotional walls he’d put up between himself and the deep well of feeling that would always be Erik’s, but was of no use to him now, had only ever hurt him.

For the first time, his future self pinned Charles with his gaze, and he had the sinking suspicion that Xavier knew _exactly_ what he was doing.

But he only said, “Rest,” and Erik’s sobs quieted disturbingly swiftly—he wondered if Old Charles was using his powers on Erik, as an analgesic for the emotional pain, but no, he didn’t think so, he thought this was another instance of Erik’s formidable self-control (except when it came to violence and murder, an uncharitable part of him thought). Erik’s breathing steadied. His eyes closed. With a start, Charles realized that Xavier’s gentleness had lured Erik to sleep—not with telepathy, but with kindness, like Daniel and the lion.

Xavier’s gaze gently drifted from Charles to Raven. “We should talk,” he said, a gravity to his words that Charles had never quite mastered (yet, he thought). “But first… Logan?”

The burly, scowling mutant they’d failed to recruit slunk out of the shadows where he’d been hiding ever since the Professor told them all to go away. “How’d you know I was still here?” he grumbled.

“I know you,” Xavier said simply. “Would you help Erik to his bed, please?”

The mutant—Logan—bent his knees and lifted Erik into his arms. Erik stirred restlessly, but Xavier reached out a hand and ran his fingers along Erik’s brow, and this time, Charles could tell, he was using his powers to soothe Erik’s mind, to convince him that the hands touching him were friendly and safe. Logan grunted as he stepped down the hall, seemingly sure of the way to _Erik’s bedroom_ without direction, and without thinking Charles moved after him, intent on following Erik and—what? Guarding him? Protecting him? Erik could take care of himself, as he’d made abundantly clear.

Raven caught his arm and nodded at Old Charles. Charles refocused; Old Charles was watching him with an unreadable expression. His gaze shifted over to Raven, who hovered, on the edge of following Erik—she’d missed him too, Charles reminded himself, trying to shake off the bitterness and jealousy, she’d _left_ because of him—and staying and hearing what Xavier had to say. “Raven, my dear, why don’t you go find Psylocke and discuss the base’s security measures? I know you won’t feel comfortable until you understand how we’re protecting ourselves.”

Raven looked at him with the same hostility she’d reserved for Charles, but after a moment, she softened, and Charles wished, once again, in spite of himself, that he had his powers back, that he could hear what had passed between them. She moved down the hallway, as sure of the layout here as she’d been in the Pentagon, and Charles surmised that part of what Old Charles had said had been a map of their base that, given how it echoed and clanked, seemed to sprawl for miles. On her way out, she rested a hand on Xavier’s shoulder, and Charles was struck with a terrible confusion and bitterness. Should he be glad that one day he would be someone that Raven would miss, would forgive? Or should he be jealous that _this_ Charles had everything he’d forced himself to stop wanting—Raven, Erik, peace with himself—and he had no concept of how to become that person, or even if he wanted to?

When she was gone, Charles tipped his chin up and faced himself. It was hard to think of Xavier as the same person—there was a terrible sadness about him, yes, but there was also a calm there, a calm Charles had never been capable of, had never imagined himself capable of. “Jean said you would explain everything.”

“And so I will,” Xavier said. He took in Charles, head to toe, his full head of hair and the way he was standing defensively. “I admit, I had hoped that she would have arrived… anytime else.”

“Fuck you,” Charles snapped.

“Indeed,” Xavier murmured. “Come, let’s retreat to my… well, where I spend most of my time. We should have tea.”

Did he just… offer himself tea? At the end of the world? “Has anyone told you how bloody absurd you are?”

A sad quirk of a smile. “Until recently, quite frequently.”

— ⓧ —

Xavier spent most of his time in a secluded nook, a fair way off the main hallway where mutants always seemed to be coming and going, to and from the infirmary, the armory, the mess hall, the children’s quarters. Charles looked around and realized abruptly what Xavier had been about to say before he corrected himself. _My study_ , or _my office._ The books were missing, the papers to grade, the trappings of the old mansion, grandfather clocks and paperweights. But there was a desk with maps and scientific papers spread out on it, in an organization scheme that Raven had always called “scatterbrained” but which Charles recognized the logic of instantly, and a chessboard on a little end table in the corner. It looked like Old Charles had been pulled away in the middle of a game; he recognized Erik’s aggressive style immediately, even though it had been five years since the last time they’d sat across from each other and just played and talked and drank and laughed. Just been together.

Xavier sat, not at the desk, but at the end table. From his drawer, he pulled out—good god, was that tea in a box?

His lips quirked, like he knew what Charles had been thinking. Of course he did. “My apologies,” he said. “Real tea is a luxury of the past, I’m afraid, except in the very highest-class of human strongholds.”

Human strongholds. God. Charles looked down at the chipped cup Xavier had provided and said, “Do you have anything a little stronger?”

“That,” Xavier said wryly, “was one of the very first things to run out. Forge sets up a still he thinks I don’t know about in the workshop, but I believe he and Hank were so busy with the machine that he hasn’t had time to re-establish it yet.”

Fuck. Charles downed the cupful of tea in one gulp, hoping that speed would mitigate the taste. “What has Jean told you?” Xavier asked.

“Can’t you tell?” Charles asked bitterly.

“You wouldn’t know this, but the mind of a mutant on Hank’s serum is particularly impenetrable,” Xavier said, without judgment. Charles still bristled. “Jean informed me she had quite the time getting into your mind to convince you of the truth of her mission.”

He remembered the splitting headache of a mind pressing against his own, the way he’d turned his head and seen Jean passed out on the dining table next to him, her hair a red halo against the wood. “She told me that in the future, mutants would become an endangered species,” he said. “That humans would invent machines—Sentinels, she called them—to exterminate us. That if I helped her find the one mutant who could stop them, you could dissect one, find its weakness, figure out a way to shut them down for good. And that you’d share the information with us, so that we could keep them from ever existing in our own timeline.”

“That’s all true,” Xavier said slowly. “As far as we understand it, at least. The truth is, we don’t know what will happen. If, by returning you to your own time, we will create a parallel universe, and go on existing in this ravaged time; or if changing your future will change our past. But whichever it is, our best chance is to capture and dissect a Sentinel, and determine how to stop them; for you and for us.”

“Why Erik?” Charles blurted out. “Why did you need to pull _him_ from the past? Surely there’s—someone else—”

“There isn’t,” Xavier said. “The Sentinels are made of metal, but the type of metal is adaptive. They can mimic the anti-telepathic materials of Shaw’s helmet; they can become radioactive in an instant, or vibranium inert to kinetic impact. Have you ever wondered why certain mutations—such as telepathy—are relatively common, where others, like Erik's control over magnetism, are not?” Charles shrugged, though of course he knew that playing coy when speaking to himself was useless at best, tiresome at worst. “Erik's mutation is extraordinary. It consists of no less than sixty known point mutations over three chromosomes and eight genes—specifically, eight of the ten known X-genes associated with superhuman powers.” Charles knew he ought to be excited about what he was discovering the future of science could accomplish—specific point mutations? that meant they had to be able to map an entire genome, that would represent a _massive_ leap forward in scientific understanding—but it was Erik he was caught on, Erik’s extraordinariness, the way he had turned to him one morning and said, “You’ll possess a power no one can match. Not even me,” how _true_ it had turned out to be. “As far as we are aware, there is no one like him. Not even his children, powerful though they are, inherited his power precisely.”

“His children?” Charles said, startled, something hot and— and _jealous_ surging through him.

Xavier’s eyes crinkled. “You met them, Jean said. Peter and Wendy.”

“His _children?!”_ Charles sputtered. He remembered the way Jean had looked at Wendy intently, the way it had changed her mind. Had Jean known—had she told them— And even as he goggled, he was doing the math in his head. 195…3? Of course, of course they were far too old to have been conceived since Charles and Erik had—and they were _broken up_ , what did it matter if Erik—and yet a wave of relief and intense interest washed over him. He tried to shake it off before Xavier saw, but the man was looking at him and a wryness played about his mouth, and Charles wearily wondered if he could have any secrets at all here. Charles shook his head. “His children. All right. Peter with the superhuman speed, and Wendy…” He hesitated. He still didn’t understand the full nature of her power.

“Wendy,” Xavier said, “was able to manipulate probabilities.”

“Was,” Charles noticed, his heart suddenly heavy as stone.

“Wendy perished in the first wave of Sentinel attacks,” Xavier said. “Peter died four years ago.”

Charles took a steadying breath. “So… the mutants you have here. They’re really… all that’s left.”

“As far as we know, yes.”

Fuck. _Fuck._ Charles covered his face with his hands. Jean had told him, but he hadn’t _truly_ believed her—it was impossible to believe without seeing for yourself—except Erik had believed her at once.

Of course he had. He’d been right, after all.

“How many,” he rasped out.

“Twenty-six adults,” Xavier told him. “Five children.”

Thirty-one mutants. Thirty-one mutants were all that were left in the world. That wasn’t endangerment, that wasn’t even grave endangerment. That was _extinction._

All their arguments, all the times Erik had called him a naïve optimist, all the times Charles had pleaded for him to believe in the essential _goodness_ of the world. “So,” he said, after a long, painful moment of silence, “he was right all along.”

“Yes,” Xavier said, “and no. You have always known that Erik has needed you, to remember that he is fighting for a future and not the past, hope and not vengeance. But you need him as well, because they hate and fear you, and self-abnegation will not be enough to change that. Remember your history? It was not one man preaching peace, but two, one calling for love of others and one calling for love of self and family, that changed the face of America.”

“It’s not history for me,” Charles whispered. 

“All the more reason you should remember it,” Xavier said with a little smile.

Sounding out the words slowly, navigating carefully around the minefield of tenses, Charles said, “If changing our future doesn’t change your past—how can you—go on? How can you believe—”

“That we will rebuild?” Xavier said. “I can believe because I know the people here as well as a person can know anyone. I can believe because I believe in _them_. Hope doesn’t die, Charles. It just takes on different forms.”

Charles wiped at his cheeks. When had they grown wet?

Xavier gave him a moment to collect himself. Charles looked up and opened his mouth, not sure what he was about to ask—then froze as everything metal in the room began to shake.

Xavier sighed. “Come with me,” he said.

He wheeled down the hall, a task made more difficult by the way the metal of his chair shuddered as his hands turned the wheels. Charles drifted after him, torn between the offer to push him and his own memory of how much it stung when others asked, the implication that he was going too slowly on his own. They didn’t have very far to go; Xavier pushed open a door whose metal lock was vibrating intensely, and Erik was there, sprawled out on the bed where Logan had evidently dumped him, his hands curled into fists and his posture stiff as a board. It took Charles a minute to register the spare wheelchair folded up in the corner, the maps and books laid out in the same organizational scheme as in Xavier’s study. Apparently, when Xavier had told Logan to bring Erik to _his room_ , he’d meant his _own_ room, something Logan had understood immediately.

“I’ll hide you from sight,” Xavier told him, and Charles opened his mouth to protest—

But Xavier had already turned away, focusing on Erik. A flicker of intent in his eyes and Erik sat bolt upright, already scrambling backward, arm raised to defend himself in a well-practiced motion, and Charles— _ached_. Had his nightmares returned with Charles there to soothe them away?

It was Erik who’d pushed him away, he reminded himself. It was Erik who’d kept up steel walls around his mind long after Dallas, long after Charles had been ready to listen to him.

“Erik,” Xavier said.

Breathing hard, Erik’s eyes were briefly wild before they settled on Xavier, took in his wheelchair, his eyes, the shape of his face, and memory visibly returned to him. The future, with a future Charles. Xavier reached out a hand and Erik flinched; he stopped, his hand still outstretched, and said, gently, “May I?”

Erik shook his head, seemingly beyond words. Charles closed his eyes, clenched his own fists to stop himself from starting toward him, reaching out the way Xavier was. Long enough might have passed for Xavier to forgive him, but not Charles. Not yet.

But Xavier said, “It is one of my deepest regrets that when my own Erik escaped Trask, I was not there to soothe his nightmares. Please, allow me to do this for you.”

Erik stared. Hesitantly, he let his face drift into Xavier’s outstretched hand. When they made skin contact—when, Charles knew, their minds touched again—he moaned, like a man in pain for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to be whole suddenly experiencing relief, and Charles felt a rough, choppy wave of jealousy that it wasn’t _him_ sitting next to Erik, making him sound like that, that it couldn’t be so long as he was on the serum, even though it _was_ him, even though all he had to do, apparently, was wait. “Calm,” Xavier said, but Erik was crawling toward him until he was half in his lap, and Charles shook with impotent—rage? jealousy? thwarted comfort and love?—as he put his head on Xavier’s shoulder, already drifting, an abstracted expression crossing his face. “You’re safe now,” Xavier whispered, and this, Charles realized, he wasn’t meant to hear. “I won’t let anything happen to you again.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Erik said, equally low, equally private.

“I’m not.”

“You’re too old to be so naïve.”

Xavier laughed, a broken, beaten-down sound, and put a gentle hand on the nape of Erik’s neck. “You are always yourself,” he said, voice barely loud enough for Erik to hear, much less Charles. But Erik was already sleeping; Charles knew that pattern of breaths well.

Xavier turned his head back to Charles and Charles knew at once that he was perceptible again. “What happened?” he breathed, heart twisted in sympathetic pain. Visions of Erik being beaten for being a mutant, of the way prison might have been worse for him than Charles had been able to imagine when he’d decided to lock Erik out of his mind for good—but then why hadn’t he called for Charles? why hadn’t he asked for help?—writhed in the camera of his mind’s eye. “You must know. He must’ve told you at some point. What _happened_ to him?”

“That,” Xavier said, “is something you should ask him yourself.”

But Charles knew that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t; that it would be too close to a kiss, too close to the press of mind to mind, too close to forgiveness. And _that_ he wasn’t ready for yet.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	11. 1992-2012: Exodus

1992.

After the Phoenix force—  
  
  
  
Well, after the Phoenix force, she doesn’t really remember.  
  
  
  
She’s so hot. She’s _so hot_. Her insides are scorching, raging, curdling into ash—

Ice. She needs to find ice. Snow. Cold.

Space vanishes for her. In less than the blink of an eye, less time than it takes for the brain to register a change, she is elsewhere. It is cold. She buries herself in the snow and screams as it scalds her, as the cold sears her skin but fails to reach where she is burning on the inside.  
  
  
  
She misses Scott.  
  
  
  
She opens her eyes—

Blue. So blue. And white, the colors streaming into her eyes, and she sobs with pain and awe.

She closes her eyes.  
  
  
  
She opens her eyes—

A man is kneeling over her.

She closes her eyes.  
  
  
  
She opens her eyes.

She’s not in the snow anymore. She’s in a—cave?

She raises her head. A thin blanket slips from her shoulders. Underneath she’s not—naked, quite, but the scorched remnants of her coat and jeans and shirt hang from her. Self consciously, she wraps an arm around her chest and looks around.

It’s a… hermit’s cave? It’s dark inside, with just an oil lantern burning dimly in the corner. In another corner, a sack of what looks like flour is closed with a silvery pin. There’s a fire pit in the center of the floor, and smoke rises from the flame through a chimneylike opening in the roof of the cave. She turns and looks for an exit; there’s a squarish opening, supported by what look like stone struts, and she crawls to the entrance—

—and looks over the most breathtaking view she’s ever seen.

She’s a suburban girl, went straight from her family home in Ithaca to Westchester, and though she’s been everywhere with the X-Men—including, recently, low-earth orbit—she’s never seen anything as breathtaking as this. Mountains, not jagged but rolling, sugar-dusted in white, rise against a sky so pure she thinks she’s never really understood _blueness_ as a concept until this moment. The mountains tower above her; she cranes her neck up, up, and still can’t seek the peak; she glances down at the rocky stone beneath her, laid out into something that almost looks like a path, and into the fog below, and can’t see an end to that, either. There is a vastness to it all, a thinness and silence in the air that tells her she is very high up indeed—the call of birds is distant, distant, and echoes sharply off the mountainside, like a choir in its harmony. And the mountains, they jut all around her like the spine of the world.

It’s difficult to catch her breath, and not just because of the thin air. She’s found the most remote place on earth to quench the fire burning in her, save perhaps the bottom of the ocean. 

A shuffling sound comes from beside her, and she turns her head to see an older man, wearing dull-colored robes, stepping toward her carrying an armful of nettles. At once, panic flares in her. “No—” she gasps, “no, I have to go—I might hurt you—”

The man… doesn’t seem to be listening to her. He moves past her and into the cave, where he lays the nettles down by the sack of flour. She wonders if he can understand her; he looks white, but the robes and remoteness of this place hint at perhaps an absence of English. She’s turning her head, eyeing the path down, and wondering if it’s worth it to just go, when he says, “You can go, if you like. Do you have somewhere _to_ go?”

His voice is pleasant, low with a faint accent that she thinks vaguely is Germanic. He still hasn’t looked at her. “I…” she says hesitantly. She doesn’t remember much. The X-Men. The screams of five billion people as she imploded a sun. Scott’s face when he’d looked at his hand, dissolving into the air as she scorched the world with her power. “I don’t… how did you find me?” she asks instead.

The man finally looks at her. There’s an intensity to his blue-gray gaze, a coolly assessing eye that makes her think: _This man is dangerous._ She abruptly feels less worried about hurting him. “The snow had melted around you,” he said. “I saw a mutant in need of help, so I brought you here.”

“Are you a mutant?” she asks hesitantly.

“What is your name?” he asks instead of answering.

 _Phoenix_ , roars the thing inside of her, and she shakes her head, as if trying to shake it out of her skull. “I don’t—I don’t remember,” she says shakily. “I don’t—”

“That’s all right,” he says. “You can stay here until you do.”  
  
  
  
A week passes until she places his face, the planes of it, his graying reddish hair and the intentness of his expression, whether he’s bent over making nettle soup or meditating in a corner. “I remember you,” she says, her voice gone distant and strained with the effort of dredging up something that already seems to belong to a past life, a past self. “You… you tried to kill the President. We stopped you.”

“Ah,” he says, and instead of responding with violence, like she half-expects, like the fire burning within her half-expects, he smiles. “You were there, hm? I’m afraid I don’t remember you. I was rather… distracted at the time.”

The names come to her slowly. Peter and Wendy. His children. “You’re…” she struggles with a name, the antagonist of the first mission she was ever sent on. At the time, standing in the wreckage of the RFK stadium, she would have thought that she’d never be able to forget it.

“Magneto,” he says, and it… suits him, so she stops trying to remember.

“How did you end up here, Magneto?” she asks.

“You’re not the only one afraid that you might hurt someone,” he tells her, and strangely it soothes her, makes her believe that she can trust him, this man with whom she has so much in common, this man who also fled to the far reaches of the earth—Tibet, she’s figured out, high in the Himalayas—to keep the rest of the world safe from himself.  
  
  
  
She borrows Magneto’s spare robe and huddles by the fire, staring into it, feeling a strange kinship with it that she can’t explain. She suspects that if she plunged her hand into the fire, she wouldn’t burn, and it’s a strange, frightening feeling, thinking that she might not be made up of the same stuff humans are. Not anymore.  
  
  
  
Her bruises heal. Her memories trickle back, slowly. The memories of Magneto, née Erik Lehnsherr, come first, perhaps because of proximity. Not just the day at the White House, but what she read about him after that—the terrorism, but also what Ms. Ichiki, her Geography teacher, had told her about the way that the earliest students at the school had been the ones that he’d rescued, including her.

The memories of Scott next—he must think her dead. It’s better that way for him, she thinks dazedly, if she can’t touch him without worrying that she’ll incinerate him from the inside out. Her friends, Ororo and Peter and Kurt and Hank. The X-Men.

The Professor returns, too, and she’s—not sure what to think about him. What he did to her. What he enabled. How she still loves him, more than her own father.

“You should practice,” Magneto tells her one day as she watches him use his own power to shape tiny metallic toys, which he trades at the village below for _tsampa_ , barley flour from which he makes tough little flatbreads.

“Practice what?” she asks, captivated by the way the metal flows around his hands, the way he adds little copper braids to a doll, a scalloping edge to a silver top.

“Whatever it is that has you so frightened of yourself that you’ve hidden away up here with me.”

For once, the idea of using her powers doesn’t send instinctive panic through her. He’s not expectant; he’s contemplative, and it settles her. “I… can’t,” she says. “When I do… people get hurt. I’ve been pushing it down all this time… I don’t know what would happen if I let it free.”

“ _When_ you let it free,” Magneto corrects her, “better to do so with no one around but me than when you inevitably decide to go back into the world. Repression is untenable. Self-control is the only sustainable way for you to live in the world, and that only comes with practice.”

“Maybe I don’t want to live in the world,” she mutters.

“Maybe you don’t,” Magneto says, surprising her. “But if you decide to leave the world behind, it shouldn’t be because you have no other choice.”

After that, she starts practicing, a little at a time. It’s like relearning her telekinesis all over again; she does the exercises the Professor taught her, struggles to hone her focus to the rock she’s lifting or the fire she’s stoking when inside her power screeches, yearns to be left free, to bring down the mountain around her, to raise the fire to mighty all-consuming blaze. But that would put Magneto in danger, and she doesn’t want to do that, not when he’s been so kind to her, so she grits her teeth and concentrates, concentrates, _concentrates_.

When it comes to her telepathy, Magneto’s shields are strong, but he lets her practice on him. It’s painful to be delicate; she thinks of his mind as being surrounded by a wall she’s pulling apart brick by brick, and it would be _so easy_ for her to just smash through it and destroy his mind—but she won’t. She won’t. She _won’t hurt him._ She feels clumsy with her power, like an Alice grown giant, like a hamfisted bull attempting neurosurgery. It’s times like these she misses the Professor most. She knows she’s stronger than him now, but she thinks that he is perhaps strong enough that she would have to work to hurt him, at least mentally. Holding Magneto’s— _Erik’s_ —mind in her hand is like holding a robin’s egg and praying that it won’t shatter.  
  
  
  
Flight is easy for her; once she goes up, up, up until she’s not going up anymore, she’s going _away_ , she can see the curve of the earth—

and the stars—

and she wants.  
  
  
  
Magneto teaches her how to meditate, which helps. Sitting cross-legged beside him as the wind whips past the seams of her robe, her world narrows to a singular point, often how goddamned cold she is. The hissing and spitting of the Phoenix inside her fades away. Her breath becomes a metronome, steady and reassuring, and she feels as though she could spend the rest of time like this, just breathing, feeling the frost gather on her skin and hearing the quiet in her head.  
  
  
  
Having the Phoenix living inside her is like having someone else in her mind. Her only frame of reference is the Professor’s gentle, questing mental touch—but the Phoenix is _nothing_ like the Professor.

The Phoenix wants to be used. The Phoenix wants to fly; the Phoenix wants to burn. _Maybe,_ she tells it sternly, _I would be more willing to use your power if you didn’t destroy_ everything you touched.

The Phoenix watches her with eyes like embers and says nothing. She thinks that maybe if she can find a way to speak with it, she could control it. Control herself, as Magneto says.  
  
  
  
“How did you stop hurting people?!” she cries, anguished, after a particularly awful session of learning to control her powers.

He doesn’t answer, just presses a bowl of nettle soup into her hands, and she takes it for what it is: _I didn’t._  
  
  
  
1993.

Over the weeks, she meets the cats. There’s one skinny little thing with a dark face and big ears, and one massive lump of gray-brown fur that barely looks like it has ears at all. Magneto feeds them, strips of meat he gets from the village, and in return they purr rustily and curl up near the fire and ignore him. “What are their names?” she asks, enthralled.

Magneto shrugs. “That one’s Stray,” he says, pointing to the skinny light one. “She showed up first. Eventually, she began bringing a friend with her. That one’s Shadow.”

“You’re not very good at naming pets, are you,” she says.

“I learned a long time ago that when you name something, it becomes yours,” Magneto says, but though the words are grim, he’s smiling, and for some reason in his mind Jean sees the Professor, sopping wet and grinning like a loon and more luminously beautiful than she’s ever seen him before.

Shadow limps up to them one day and she watches as Magneto gently splints and bandages her hurt paw. She wonders if he, too, has a habit of taking in strays. “Jean,” she says abruptly. “My name is Jean.”

Magneto doesn’t even look up from his task. “It’s lovely to meet you, Jean,” he says, and like that, she has a name again.  
  
  
  
Control comes slowly, with days wherein the Phoenix screeches in her so brightly that she finds herself flying up to the sun to burn herself out without hurting anyone. But those days grow fewer and farther between, and on that isolated mountainside, she learns to do nearly everything she was once able to do, but better, stronger. She can combine her telekinesis and telepathy to make psionic constructs now, and Magneto teaches her how to fight with the blades and hammers she crafts from thin air; she can hear the murmurs of the thoughts of the village below her, though they’re hours away by foot; she can slip into the astral plane as easily as breathing, and bring herself out of it again without any physical stimulus, which she’d never been able to do before; she can use her telekinesis to rearrange molecules now, and turns her scratchy dull robe to a vibrant green silk. Magneto watches her with amusement and approval, and it feels like she’s reliving her happiest moments at the Xavier School.

Slowly, the fear of harming Magneto fades, but she still refuses to go down into the village with him. She’s worried that the minds will overwhelm her; Magneto tells her that she’s ready, that he knows that she can withstand the press and bustle of humanity beneath, but she’s still frightened, and so she tells him no. And no. And no again.

Then he drugs her and she wakes up in the middle of the village and she almost flies back to the cave to _kill him_ , except.

Except it is _beautiful._ She takes a meditative breath, slips into the state of practiced calm that Magneto helped her find, and immediately the babble of noise around her fades to something tolerable, and all she sees instead are bright glints of emotion, like the kernels of jewels hidden in rock. Each mind is distinct, a work of art—she was never one for art museums, but art museums were never like _this—_ she looks around, dazed, and the people look at her strangely, but she can tell, for the first time, that it’s with concern for this strange girl with the abstracted expression who looks like she’s about to cry at any moment instead of fear or suspicion. That mind glitters like a net of pearls. That mind twists and towers like spires of rock. That mind is stubborn and mulish like fabric pulled taut but refusing to break.

She stands there, tears rolling down her cheeks, until a girl a little younger than her touches her on the shoulder and says in a language Jean has never heard before but that she can nevertheless understand, “Are you all right, older sister?”

“Yes,” she chokes out, using her telepathy, new and reborn and old and familiar, to get her point across. “Yes, I’m—I’m fine. For the first time in a long time, I think I’m okay.”  
  
  
  
“That was hard of you,” she says when she gets back to the cave.

He shrugs. “ _You_ are hard on me,” he says, and then, with less humor, “In hard times, we all have to do hard things.” She thinks it is something that he has repeated to himself many times before. She isn’t sure if she agrees, but she takes the bowl of nettle soup from his anyway and sips cautiously, the warm broth trickling across her tongue and tasting like home.  
  
  
  
He catches her looking across the mountains more and more often, and one day finally says to her, “You should go.”

Stricken, she looks back at him. “You’re kicking me out?”

“No,” he says, in tones as kind as anything she’s ever heard from him. “But you’re not like me, Jean. I’m here because I have nowhere else to go. People miss you, and you miss them. You no longer have to worry about hurting them. So you should go.” He holds out the little metal shape he’s been working on. It’s a pendant on a string of sinew, the kind some of the monks wear, but instead of the Buddha there’s a bird emblazoned and embossed on the brass. Fire curls from its wings, made of a subtly different material—bronze, she thinks. “But you should also know that you are always welcome to return.”

She takes it gingerly, a lump in her throat. Magneto turns away. He’s never liked good-byes.  
  
  
  
Under her telekinetic wings, the world feels warm and new and—everything, everything. She no longer feels trapped, a cosmic being bound to earth; she has remembered that the sun is also a star.  
  
  
  
She lands at the gates of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters and, with a laugh, looks down at her robe and rearranges the molecules to what she was wearing when they saw her last—the leather duster, the plain reddish shirt, the jeans. She pushes the door open and strides across the grounds. She doesn’t consciously want them not to see her, but she does think it’ll be a nice surprise for the others—and yes, even the Professor, though she hasn’t forgiven him entirely for his part in the whole Phoenix mess—so she nudges away the curious, seeking minds that look up from their play to goggle at her. Soon the children are running about again and ignoring her entirely.

She knocks on the door instead of opening it with her powers. It’s Hank that throws the door opens, and his face blanches a pale blue when he sees her.

“Hello,” she says softly. “What have I missed?”

“Jean,” he gasps, and throws his furry arms around her.

She’s laughing, he’s crying and shedding all over her clothes, and there’s a thundering down the stairs as people come to see what the commotion is all about—”Jean!” Kurt shouts, and then she is _surrounded_ by blue and she’s clutching back at them, projecting her warm, bubbling happiness over to them so they have no doubt that this isn’t somehow a trick by Mystique or the Brotherhood, that this is _their Jean_ , returned from the dead. Peter zips around her, too ecstatic to remain still for long, and Jubilation comes charging out of the kitchen to throw her arms around Jean and join the pile, her oldest friend at the school, the girl who had taken her in as a foundling and never let her go.

“What is—”

The Professor stops as he rounds the corner. His face is very white. “Jean?” he asks tremulously.

“Hey, Professor,” she says, and seeing him melts much of the residual anger that’s been simmering inside of her. At the end, he’d expressed regret for what he’d done to her mind and promised, his own mind pressing the sincerity of his emotions into hers, that he would never do such a thing again, and… he is the man who raised her, after all. Where seeing her father again had burned the flames of her rage higher, hotter, seeing the Professor—unsettles the firebird in her chest, yes, but it takes only a moment of meditation to calm it back down.

His expression is… _hilarious_. He must have been able to feel the rush of rising danger and, just as immediately, its dampening. She smiles sweetly at him and resolves to keep where she’s been a secret for a little longer; she’s mostly forgiven him, but only mostly.

“Jean,” he says, moving tentatively toward her. “Where… where have you been?”

“Learning to control my new powers,” she tells them. “I… I’m sorry I wasn’t in touch. That I let you believe I was dead. But I didn’t want to put you at risk.”

Kurt is already shaking his head in forgiveness, tears beading in his eyes, and Hank is rushing over himself to say that of course he understands, of course, and Jubilation is cursing at her, and then Scott. Scott is standing on the steps.

“Scott,” she breathes.

“Jean?” he asks uncertainly.

She watches him descend the stairs, slowly, like he’s not sure his feet will give out from under him, like he’s not sure that this isn’t a dream. She opens her arms for him, and he more or less stumbles into them, his arms coming up around her belatedly, like he’s forgotten about his own body.

Around them, a rising sense of trepidation from the others. Why?

“Jean, you’re… back?” Scott says. “Jean… Jean, is that you?”

“Yeah,” she whispers.

“God. God. I thought… I thought you were dead.”

Why is that… _guilt_ she hears in his voice?

She pulls back. “Scott,” she says, “what’s wrong.”

“Sugar,” says a timelessly pretty blond woman who had come down the stairs with Scott, “I think you and our boy need to have a bit of a talk.”  
  
  
  
She doesn’t incinerate the school, but it’s a close call.

“Is it the telepath thing?!” she demands, after she’s stormed out onto the lawn. They’ve been arguing for hours, and it’s just starting to get nasty. The Professor semi-graciously let them have his office, but right now, she just needs to be breathing the evening air, needs the proximity to the stars to soothe what is feeling a lot like the same claustrophobia that used to herald the Phoenix. “Is the fact that you’re straight the only thing that kept you from jumping the Professor’s bones right after my funeral?”

“Don’t be disgusting!”

“Why not?! She’s older than him, did you know that?” Scott makes a face and she realizes abruptly that he _didn’t_ know that—not that she had, either, when Emma Frost had just been the Brotherhood’s resident telepath and her archenemy, not until she’d slipped into Magneto’s mind and witnessed the long and painful history between everyone of that generation firsthand. “Why on _earth_ you ever thought jumping into _Emma Frost’s_ bed was a good idea—”

“You let me think you were dead!” Scott shouts, and oh no. Oh no, those are tears slipping down past the lenses of his glasses.

“I didn’t want to—”

“To hurt me, you said! But I just needed a sign, Jean! A mental word! Something! _Anything!_ I _buried_ you! And Emma—Emma was there for me when no one else was—it’s not like I cheated on you—I _thought_ you were _dead—”_

 _“_ That’s not why I’m angry!” she insists, frustrating blubbering hot and tearful at the back of her throat. “I don’t _care_ that you moved on, I care that you moved on with my _worst enemy_ , the _evil bitch_ of the Brotherhood of Mutants—”

“Don’t talk about her that way—”

“—and that, apparently, you didn’t even wait a month to do it—”

“It didn’t _mean_ anything then—”

“But now it does?!”

They’re both panting, standing as far apart from each other as they can manage while still being able to hear what they’re screaming across the lawn to each other. Scott deflates suddenly, a very lost, very confused look on his face. “Yeah,” he says, “I think it does.”

Jean straightens. She can feel fire crackle at the edges of her fingers, the urge of the Phoenix to unfurl its wings. “Okay,” she says softly, and the fear on Scott’s expression breaks her. He’s not afraid of his heart, not afraid of what he feels, which are expressions she’s familiar with. He’s afraid of _her_. Her and her power.

And that she can’t even begin to process. So she closes her eyes—

—and opens them in the Himalayas. Snow is softly falling around her. A clatter of the large iron pot being set down on the cave floor. “Jean?” Magneto asks, bewildered.

She turns around, and she must look awful, because Magneto, who has never touched her beyond a gentle hand to wake her from her nightmares in the entire year they’ve known each other, holds out his arms, and she leans into them, sobbing, trying to wash the Phoenix and Scott and the entire last year from the stupid space mission to now from her soul.  
  
  
  
1994.

“Jean,” Sangmu says, giggling, “there’s… _someone_ here to see you.”

Jean turns, startled, from the bolts of cloth she's been admiring. She likes Market Day, the only day of the week on which she and Magneto venture down to the village to stock up on staples like barley flour, she likes the meld of new minds around her like an impressionistic painting. Her range is good enough that if she wanted to, she _could_ eavesdrop on private conversations down in the village from their hermit’s cave, but she doesn’t. She’s trying to be a better kind of telepath, and that means respecting people’s privacy, inasmuch as that’s possible.

She’s been looking at beads and cloth, thinking about making a gift for Jubilation, and the idea that she has a visitor that Sangmu wouldn’t recognize is… interesting. The others come to see her regularly now that they know she’s alive and where she is; Kurt and Peter poof over once every other month or after particularly interesting missions, and Jubilation makes a point of bullying Kurt into taking her to visit every couple of weeks, but Sangmu knows them all by name now. They usually wait for her down in the Cho Oyu base camp a few hundred meters down from the village, where foreigners stick out less. “Thank you,” she tells her, and Sangmu giggles again and runs off. She reaches out with a thought to let Magneto know where she’ll be, and she heads down to the camp.

She senses his mind from a mile away; Scott is there.

He’s bundled up warmly, and as she steps over to him in her wooden sandals, she thinks they must make quite a pair: him in warm ski gear, a jacket so puffy it all but doubles the thickness of his arms and ruby quartz ski goggles that Beast must have made special for him, shuffling nervously in his thick boots, and she in a relatively light robe—she doesn’t feel the cold anymore—all golds and reds, dyes more vibrant than anything else in the village because she makes her clothes with her mind. “Scott,” she says, her voice infused with surprise. Slowly, over the past year, they’ve learned to be friends again, but this is… different. She sees him when she visits Westchester, but he’s never come all the way to Tibet to speak with her before. “Hello.”

“Hi, Jean,” he says shyly.

“Is… something wrong? At the school, or—”

“No,” he says quickly, “nothing like that. No. I just… wanted to see you.”

“All right,” she says, bewildered. “So… how are you, Scott?”

“I broke up with Emma,” he says quickly, like if he doesn’t say it now he’ll never get up the courage, which is hilarious, because she’s seen him stare down the entire Brotherhood of Mutants without flinching. “And I’m not… I’m not _expecting_ anything. But I miss you. And I just wanted to see… if we could start over?”

“And what did you say?” Magneto asks later over dinner, his voice a studied mask of disinterest. Jean knows better; she gets the sense that he’s devouring mental popcorn by the bucketload, and no surprise, this is the most entertainment he’s had in four years. She’s his own personal soap opera, she suspects.

And she should’ve said no. She should’ve let them both move on, let them both deal with the trauma of her presumed death in their different ways, not tried to turn back the clock to recapture a time that was lost to them forever. But she hadn’t.

She’d said, “Ask me again next week, and we’ll see,” and Scott had smiled at her, and his smile, it turned out, still made her feel the way it had when he’d first smiled at her, when they’d been young and scared and not totally in control of themselves, but meeting someone else equally young and scared and not in control was like meeting your soulmate, like creating your soulmate in your own image.  
  
  
  
1996.

“It’s my wedding,” she pleads. It’s been two months since she’s moved back to the school to teach geometry and telepathic shielding full-time, but here she stands again, in a Tibetan hermit’s cave, pleading with the most antisocial man she’s ever known to put on a suit for one afternoon and let her fly him to the school so she can have everyone she loves there for just one day plus pictures.

“No,” Magneto says.

“Sangmu is coming,” she tries.

“I didn’t even know her name until you came along, why would I care?”

“Just trying to demonstrate that being on the other side of the world is no excuse. I know a lot of teleporters.”

“I’ve known my own share of teleporters, I know what they’re capable of,” Magneto tells her, one of the rare slivers of information about his life before the cave he shares with her of his own will. “The answer is still no.”

“Come on,” she wheedles. “I won’t even make you wear a suit, you can wear that horrible old robe.”

“No.”

“I want Shadow to be my ringbearer?”

He snorts. “No.”

She pulls out her trump card. “It would mean a lot to me,” she says, with the big eyes that the Professor had gotten used to two generations of students before her ago, but against which Magneto hopefully doesn’t have the same defenses.

He blinks at her, and she can see him wavering— “Still no,” he tells her, and she groans.

“Fine,” she huffs, and places the invitation on the ground next to his sleeping mat. “In case you change your mind,” she tells him, although if there’s no way he’s going to let Kurt teleport him to the wedding, there’s almost certainly no way that he’s going to climb down the mountain, get on a plane, and fly over seven thousand miles to Westchester county, New York. “I know that you and the Professor have… history together,” she says delicately. That had been one of the closed-off areas in Magneto’s mind, and out of deference she’d never pried, but it was hard to miss that all the holes in Magneto’s memory were suspiciously Charles Xavier-shaped. “But it won’t be his day. It’ll be mine. And it won’t be complete without you there.”

Magneto rolls his eyes, and she shrugs off the knowledge that her blatant attempt at emotional manipulation had failed. She’d had to try, hadn’t she?

But—the day of her wedding, the Professor rolls up to her with a complicated expression on his face and a shabby parcel, postmarked to hell and back, under his right arm. It’s address to THE BRIDE in a neat, slanting hand. Curious, Jean unwraps it with the Professor still hovering at her elbow to uncover a gorgeously wrought brass picture frame, complete with Art Deco flourishes to frame the couple’s faces. It goes with absolutely nothing in her and Scott’s suite. It’s beautiful. She loves it. She smiles and moves to arrange it on their mantel, still empty for now, but just waiting for their wedding portrait.

“Who is it from?” the Professor asks her, an odd note in his voice.

“My mentor in Tibet,” she tells him. “Magneto.” And the Professor’s face does something that makes her briefly wonder if she’s had a seizure, before she remembers—complicated, memories tidied up away from the eyes of prying young women, and the Professor probably has a side of the story just as complicated and full of feeling as Magneto’s. But it’s her wedding day, so instead of asking, she just waits for him to settle. And eventually, he does, though it takes a long moment. He blinks and looks back at her, present again, and takes her proffered arm, ready to guide her down the aisle. And they both leave the past where it belongs.  
  
  
  
And the years pass—  
  
  
  
2010.

Her first class of the day is always telepathic shielding, because no one deserves to have geometry inflicted upon them at eight in the morning. “First,” she’s saying, “we’ll each identify a touchstone. Something to hold on to to remind you of reality. Your subconscious is always capable of identifying telepathic interference, no matter how slight; your touchstone will signal to you that something is out of place, and, when you’re mentally strong enough, work like a thread in a labyrinth guiding you out of a telepath’s illusions back into the real world.”

“Do telepaths have touchstones?” young Roberto da Costa asks.

“For telepaths, it's often another person's mind, usually the person they're closest to.” Even now, Scott’s mind surrounds her like a shield, like a city wall keeping out the distraction and noise of other people’s thoughts. She’s a strong enough telepath to be able to survive on her own shields, but she won’t pretend it wasn’t a relief when Scott let her back into his mind and she could use his blissfully non-telepathic psyche to dampen the noise all around her. “Now, focus on an object that means a lot to you. Maybe a childhood toy, or a special gift—”

But then she frowns. Two halls away, she can feel Ororo approaching her with intent, anxiety hovering around her like a cloud of buzzards. “Hang on,” she says, and mentally taps at her mind: _What’s wrong?_

 _You need to see this,_ Ororo thinks back grimly, and refuses to elaborate. _The office._

Jean watches the Sentinels come on the Professor’s huge monitor in stunning high-definition. And though she has no concept yet of what this is the start of, the scope of the destruction awaits, the Phoenix twitches in her mind, and she shivers; like, her mother would say, someone walking across her grave.


	12. 2023: Family Found and Lost

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

Jean led him down several winding corridors. It was when they passed a room which, despite being covered with a plastic curtain, was clearly a surgical suite that Alex began to worry that she had brought him down here to dissect him, for the good of the future or whatever. He stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Where are you taking me?”

“You’ll see,” Jean said distractedly.

“Why did you insist that I come with?” he demanded. “Do you know me? I saw Hank back there, but not myself—what _happens_ to me in the future?”

Jean shrugged. “No one knows,” she said. “You go missing in Vietnam. One of the first casualties of a war we didn’t even know we were fighting.”

“Viet—why the hell would I join the army?”

Her lips thinned. “You didn’t exactly have a choice. The draft—Magneto figured it out later. It lined up eerily well with known mutants whose powers would have a military application. They conscripted you and every other mutant with offensive abilities they could find, and dragged millions of men along with you.”

Alex’s mouth was dry. “When does it happen?”

“1969.”

A year. He had a year.

Jean looked at him. She softened; the lines around her eyes crinkled. “Move to Canada, Alex. Just for a few years. It’ll save everyone a lot of pain in the long run.”

A thought pinged at the back of his mind. “How do you know this about me? Who am I to you?”

“We’re here,” Jean said, and pushed open another nondescript metal door. The institutional aesthetic of this place creeped him out; it was like a hospital or research base, built underground by the lack of windows, but moldering, with cracked ceiling tiles and places where the roof supports had crumbled in such a way that seemed to threaten to bring the ground down over their heads at any moment. 

It was an infirmary; there was only one person lying on a makeshift hospital bed. A pretty young woman with very green eyes and purple streaks in her hair looked them over, then bustled off to make herself busy elsewhere.

Jean immediately gravitated toward the cot, where a man about her age with bandages wrapped around his skull and right eye under a pair of red-lensed glasses reclined. He seemed to be sleeping.

“Scott,” she said softly, and stroked his hair, but Alex had already recognized him without it: his jaw, his nose, his stupid ears. The last time he’d seen them had been on a baby. His baby brother.

“Jean,” his big-little brother murmured, “are you back? Did you do it?” 

“I did, and I have a surprise for you,” Jean was saying, but Alex wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t capable of anything but wetting his lips and summoning up the only world he could pronounce: “Scotty?” he breathed, and Scott’s head jerked to him.

It took him a moment, a moment in which Alex’s heart felt like it would beat out of his chest, but he breathed, “Alex?” and his whole world collapsed in on this moment, when, at the end of the world, he was looking at his brother, who had _survived_ , even if he himself hadn’t.

“Oh, god, Scott,” he gasped and reached out for Scott’s trembling hands. He wrapped his own hands around Scott’s outstretched left, and, to his horror, felt tears prickle at his eyes. He closed them, trying to fight them down, but Scott sniffled, and then that set him off; when Scott cried, really cried, not just tantrum-cried or need-cried, Alex had always teared up along with him, and it seemed that hadn’t changed, even if he wouldn’t get to watch Scott grow up, even if a year from now his life would narrow to the jungles and battlefields of Vietnam, Scott forever a toddler in his mind’s eye.

“Alex, oh my god,” Scott whispered. “It’s really you—”

“I can’t believe how big you got,” Alex croaked out. “That’s—that’s what big brothers say when they haven’t seen their little brothers in a long time, right?”

“Yeah,” Scott said, voice cracked open like an egg on a griddle. “Yeah, that’s what big brothers say.”

In the corner of his eye, Jean stroked Scott’s head, and smiled tiredly, like everything she’d been through in the last 24 hours had been worth it just for this.

— ⓧ —

They fumbled, Scott trying to catch Alex up on the life he’d lived that Alex had missed, skipping around a little wildly, a little manic, obviously hopped up on drugs from the injury he’d sustained. Alex had asked him what his mutant power was and Scott had grinned, a little shy, and showed him.

“Hey!” the mutant called Blink had shouted from across the room. “I will _pāi jī_ you even if you are hurt, _la,_ you get it?!”

“Scott,” Jean had said, sounding frantic, “your head…”

Scott smiled sheepishly. “I know, but… I wanted to show him.”

“Your blasts,” Alex had said, dazed. “They’re like…”

He’d summoned up a ring of energy, as gently as he could. Blink had shouted again.

Tears had glittered in Scott’s eyes. “That’s… just like my powers,” he said softly. “I never knew…”

Alex had grinned. “Looks like something other than good looks are genetic,” and Scott had laughed until he’d sobbed.

Scott had been one of Charles’s students, and then a teacher, and Alex’s breath caught when he thought about his little brother following in his footsteps, even though he was barely a teacher, more of a standoffish coach. They talked until a bell rang out, and Jean stood, placing a kiss to Scott’s forehead. “I’ll bring you some soup,” she said, and Scott made a face, and she said to Alex, “Come on, we should eat. That’s the meal summons.”

Alex’s stomach grumbled. Torn, he looked back at Scott, who smiled. His face was lined like Jean’s, and like her there was a touch of gray at his temples. “Go,” he said, and he marveled at the man his brother had grown into, this mature, patient, understanding man, the man Alex had never been. “There will be time later.”

Jean took him by the elbow and tugged, and her grip was surprisingly strong, and he really ought to check up on Charles and make sure that he hadn’t killed or fallen into bed with Erik again, so he let himself be dragged along. Scott waved, a little shyly, until he was out of sight. Jean led him through more winding, creeping passageways, a layout she seemed to have memorized despite having said that they’d only moved here a week or so ago after the latest Sentinel attack, and they walked in silence for a little bit, Alex unsure how to thank her, still raw and aching from the reunion, until he cleared his throat and said, “So… how long have you and my brother been…”

“We’ve been married for twenty-seven years,” Jean said.

“ _What?!”_ Alex exclaimed. “That’s… that’s longer than I’ve been alive.” Longer, maybe, than he would ever live to be.

“It’s 2023,” she said, with a hint of a smile. “We’re both fifty-six years old, Alex. We’ve lived entire lives.”

Somehow, “fifty years in the future” didn’t give him quite as much clarity on how far he had traveled as the knowledge that his brother, his literal baby of a brother, was in his _fifties._ Alex drifted along a little bit, uncertain of how to go on, or what he even wanted to say. Finally he said, hesitantly, “His injury…”

“He got stabbed in the eye by a Sentinel,” Jean said. 

Alex closed his eyes and swallowed.

Years ago, he’d elected to stay with Charles instead of going chasing bases where mutants were being experimented on with Erik, and it was because in spite of what Charles and Raven and Erik were always preaching, he never felt that strong a tie to a _mutant community._ His parents were human, and if they didn’t know what to do with him it was less because he shot plasma beams out of his body and more because he was simply an unmanageable child who felt more at home first in detention and then in prison than in the classroom or the outside. His brother, as far as he’d known, was human. He’d stayed with Charles not just because he suspected his powers weren’t quite suited to a clandestine mission, but because his allegiance had always been to the family they’d built there, to Charles and Erik and Raven and even Sean and Hank.

He wasn’t sure if it was discovering that Scott was _like him_ ( _so_ like him, his eye beams were even the same color as Alex’s rays) that had changed his mind or experiencing the full scope of the genocide that was in store for them, but for the first time he wished he’d accompanied Erik on his missions. That he could say that Alex Summers, in the brief time he had before he vanished in Vietnam, had done something to stop this future hurtling inevitably towards them, their destruction careening ever closer, ever closer.

He was quiet for the rest of the walk to the makeshift canteen.

— ⓧ —

When Erik woke again, it was to the sound of a bell that Xavier announced meant dinnertime. “When was the last time you ate?” he asked Charles with a warm, concerned glance about which Charles wasn’t sure what he felt, and without waiting for an answer, expertly herded both Charles and Erik down several halls into a room that had been set up as a cafeteria, with tables arranged in long rows and mismatched seats pulled up to them. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve thought Xavier had used his telepathy on them both; but it was an Erik-herding trick he was familiar with, overwhelming him with cheerful chatter until Erik, who was well-practiced in the art of waiting for his moment to strike, went along with whatever he wanted him to do just to shut him up.

Charles couldn’t help but count heads as they filed in. It seemed like the vast majority of the adult mutants had come to dinner, and a couple of the children as well. Xavier wheeled to the head of the center table, where there was a conspicuous space in the line of chairs for his wheelchair, and hesitantly Erik took the seat next to him. Charles sat on the other side of the table, as far away from Erik as he could subtly manage, but the dark-lidded look Erik sent him told him that he had noticed.

They were joined by Jean, leading a shell-shocked Alex, and Charles opened his mouth to ask him what was wrong, but before he could, Logan slid into a seat across from Jean and Charles couldn’t help but notice the way Erik’s attention snapped to him immediately. Was that—no, Charles knew what lust looked like on Erik, and that wasn’t it. (Logan, he thought with a faint mental sniff, was hardly Erik’s type anyway. He was immediately appalled at himself for caring, _at all._ ) But he eyed Logan with naked fascination until he grunted, “Adamantium skeleton.”

Erik looked like he wanted to devour him—not in the way he’d sometimes looked at Charles, but at the way he looked at particularly fascinating alloys. “That’s…”

“Painful,” Logan said, and that effectively cut off the conversation.

Raven was the last to join them, accompanied by the woman with purple hair he’d seen earlier. She escorted Raven to their table, then drifted off to one of the other tables. Glancing around, Charles noticed that, in fact, the rest of the mutants had crammed themselves at the other tables, leaving the far end of the table Xavier, his little inner circle, and the time travelers were sitting at empty.

“They’re a little intimidated by you,” Xavier said, with a faint smile. “They know you’re here to… well, save us.”

“Are we?” Raven said softly.

“That’s not a ton of pressure at all,” Alex muttered.

Dinner was canned green beans and an unidentifiable meat thing that reminded Charles of the stories he’d heard about Mulligan stew, the hodgepodge of ingredients and flavors that hobos scraped together from whatever they’d had during the Great Depression. Alex poked at it; Charles stared at his own plate and wished, badly, for brandy. Raven, who had always eaten whatever was put in front of her, likely a holdover from her years on her own, chewed grimly through the tough, gritty meat. Only Erik seemed not to notice what he was eating, plowing through the food with the same absolute mechanical disinterest with which he’d eaten dinner at the mansion so many years before.

“How is Scott?” Xavier said after a moment of cutlery-clinking and scraping.

The name was familiar, but Charles didn’t recall how until Alex’s head snapped up. Scott, like Alex’s younger brother—and a mutant as well, apparently. Charles felt that old stirring of interest, the way in which mutation appeared with no rhyme or reason except when it was inherited, except sometimes it wasn’t. “Better,” Jean said. “Still bandaged up but Blink cleared him to use his powers, apparently.”

Logan grunted. “He good for the next mission?”

“No,” Jean snapped, and blinked when she realized that Alex had said it with her.

“Jean,” Xavier said, not reprovingly, but not in a way that was capable of bending either. “We may not have a choice. With Colossus’s death—”

“He’ll get himself killed and then we’ll get everyone else killed when the line breaks,” Jean said coldly. Her eyes seemed to glint amber in the harsh fluorescent light that permeated the entire base.

“Can’t we help?” Raven piped up, and Charles’s attention swung to her. A flash of horror swept through him—was she really so enamored of fighting that even now, in a future where they’d lost so irrevocably, she was determined to keep her fists up, her knuckles bloody? “Alex and Erik and I—we can all fight. We need to stick around long enough to take down an Sentinel, right? If we can help you while we do it, so much the better.”

She pointedly didn’t look at Charles. Charles gritted his teeth and glared down at the thing on his plate. He knew she’d left him out because he didn’t have his powers, wouldn’t have his powers for another twenty hours, but there was a hint of maliciousness to it, too, an unsubtle reminder that like this, he was useless to her. 

Logan cast a sideways glance at Xavier. “It would help, Chuck,” he said.

Chuck _._ Christ. Just kill him now, that he would never become the kind of person people called _Chuck._

“We will see,” Xavier said after a moment. “First, we should inform you more fully about the threat you’re facing. If you still want to fight after that… we’re not in a position to turn down the help.”

And Erik, ever the general, ever the warmonger, pushed aside his scraped-clean plate and said, “Let’s hear it, then.”

Jean briefed the others with the same information that Xavier had given him, about the Sentinels being made of adaptive metal. The subject seemed to make Logan antsy; he tapped his claws against the table, earning a reproving look from Xavier. But Xavier’s focus seemed to be taken up, mostly, with watching Erik, who had clasped his hands together and was listening intently.

“They target mutants,” Jean was saying, “but not just mutants. Humans, as well—anyone with a specific sequence within their genes that is likely to mutate into an active X-gene during reproduction.”

“How can they know?” Alex asked. 

“They scan the genetic sequence of anyone they come into contact with,” Jean said. “They cross-reference it with a database built from—from experimentation on captured mutants.”

“They know because of you,” Logan interrupted, and Charles started, but he wasn’t looking at him, he was looking—

—at Erik.

“Logan,” Xavier said sharply, but Logan paid no heed to the man at the head of the table.

“They harvested the information they needed to target mutants from your DNA,” Logan continued. “All that time you spent with Trask and Stryker—they made good use of it.”

It was as though cold river water pumped through Charles’s veins instead of blood. _Eight of the ten known X-genes associated with superhuman powers,_ Xavier had said of Erik’s mutation. _Extraordinary,_ Charles had thought. But he hadn’t thought through the consequences—that someone so _extraordinary_ would be a perfect specimen, that in Erik’s genes lay everything they needed to understand 80% of mutants. 80% of what they needed to destroy them.

And in spite of himself Charles _ached_ for Erik. He’d known—he’d always known—that back when they’d been together, Erik had only loved one thing more than Charles, and it had been mutantkind. To hear that he had been, unwittingly, the instrument of their destruction—

Erik’s breathing was very steady. He tipped his chin up, tightly controlled, unblinking, and said, “I suppose that’s where the adaptive properties of their metal forms come from as well,” and Charles closed his eyes and despaired.

“Yes,” Jean said, but like it hurt her to do so.

“There’s something else you have to understand about Sentinels,” Logan said briskly. “They’re killing machines. They neutralize our powers, and then they slaughter us. It was bad enough with mutants who were physically human, but the moment the shit hit the fan was when the mutants who had hardened physiologies started dropping like flies. Colossus we lost three raids ago; he could turn his body to organic steel. The Sentinels pulled him apart by the limbs. Kitty we lost with him; she could go intangible. They became radioactive and poisoned the air around her. And they were good fighters, seasoned fighters. Me, my skeleton is made of adamantium, but one spike to the skull from a Sentinel in adamantium form and I’m dead. So if any of you are serious about helping us out, you better be sure of your abilities and selves. One slip in control and you will get someone killed—”

Abruptly, Jean stood, pushing her plastic cafeteria chair back with a loud screech. Logan shut up; the mess hall fell silent.

She turned on her heel and stalked outside, but not before everyone at the table could see the tears glittering in her eyes.

“I didn’t mean—” Logan said regretfully.

“Erik,” Xavier said, “would you speak to her?”

Charles’s shock seemed only to be rivaled by Erik’s own. “I…” he said, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I’m not the person she remembers.”

“That’s not why I’m asking.”

Baffled, Erik stood and followed Jean outside. Charles watched him go, torn between avoiding the inevitable of his next confrontation with Erik and keeping him in sight at all times. _To make sure he doesn’t escape before you can throw him back in his cell,_ he told himself, although that excuse was ringing hollower all the time. “Why?” he asked Xavier under his breath as slowly conversation resumed, with Raven drilling Logan about past Sentinel tactics and Alex looking alternately lost and sick.

Xavier chuckled. “Do you remember what you said to Alex the first time he used his powers in the bunker? To Raven in the kitchen the night before? What you almost said to Erik on the beach? Did you ever wonder why the students went to you for support and guidance, but Erik in times of crisis?” Charles flinched; it had been a long time since he’d thought about that, those beautiful few months that Erik had been by his side running the school. “I've long come to terms with the fact that we are cursed with the ability to find the worst possible thing to say in any situation and say it. Erik is—the opposite. He'll know what to say to Jean.” A note of melancholy. “He always does.”

— ⓧ —

Erik tracked Jean by the wristband she still wore that had transported them all to the future, an intriguing mishmash of finely-wired circuitry and transistors and other tiny, meticulous components encased in a simple copper-and-platinum band. She took a long, straight route out from the bowels of the compound until she reached a massive steel door, which she shoved open with a power that felt distinct from Erik’s own metal manipulation; her telekinesis, he thought. Outside, the wind howled and snow fell in clumps. Erik shivered but relished it; after the carefully-controlled sterile coldness of the facility, this wild, biting pain was welcome.

He stepped up to her shoulder. She didn’t look at him, but her tears glittered coldly on her cheeks.

“Did you lose someone like that, then?” Erik said, brisk and businesslike. Why Charles’s older self had sent him after a tearful woman, he’d never know, but at the time he hadn’t questioned it, just bent to Charles’s will; not like he’d used his powers to change the shape of his mind, but like instinct, like it was the easiest thing in the world.

“I lost everyone like that,” Jean said softly. “I used to be a conduit for this… cosmic power. I used to be—measured objectively, not with flattery—the most powerful mutant on the planet. But when the Sentinels came… the first thing they did was take out everyone who could be a threat to their plans. The governments of Earth made an alliance with an alien race, and together they ripped the Phoenix out of me… and left me like this. Missing half my powers, helpless to do anything but watch and survive as the people I love die. My friends. The kids I raised at the school. My husband, eventually.” Her tears had frozen on her face like diamonds, like little luminous drops of silver. “The last attack, Scott took a spike in the eye. It’s a miracle he survived at all. And I couldn’t… couldn’t stop it—”

Her fists were clenched so hard they shook, and at once Erik understood. It wasn’t fear that tormented her. It was _anger_. At the humans, but more, at herself. At her own inability to protect the people she loved.

And that— _that_ , Erik understood intimately.

“You’re angry,” he told her, and her shoulders tightened, her knuckles went white, but he continued, “You should be angry. But anger alone is not enough to fill that hole in you, the responsibility you feel to the dead. Only action will do that.”

“…And you can only act when you’ve learned self-control,” Jean finished. Her fists had loosened a little. She laughed, a tired, strained sound, but a genuine one.

“That’s funny?” Erik said with a raised eyebrow.

“No, it’s just… that's exactly what Magneto would have said.”

Magneto. His presence pressed heavily on Erik. Charles may not have noticed, but the way the others looked at him—a curious mixture of grief and intrigue—it told him all he needed to know about his older counterpart. Or rather, who he had been, and where he was now. “Were you and I… close?” he asked. _Before I died._

Jean scrubbed at her face, at the tears that had frozen in tracks on her skin. “There was a time when the thing I was most scared of in the world was my own powers. You helped me learn control then—not just of my abilities, but of myself.”

It was—what he’d dreamed of, once upon a time, with Charles. One of them teaching self-mastery, the other one teaching self-love. But it had been such a long time since he’d associated himself with the teacher he could’ve been, a long time since he’d resigned himself to the knowledge that such a dream was forever out of reach. How could he teach control when he couldn’t even demonstrate it himself? When he couldn’t even bend a bullet harmlessly into the air? When he couldn’t save the President. When he couldn’t save Charles.

But Jean was looking at him like—like she had total faith in the person he’d become. Fifty-five years was a long time, he knew. Maybe one day…

Jean’s head tilted to the side and he froze. He knew that body language; it was the tic of a telepath for whom someone unexpected had just come into range. But her fists weren’t raised, she didn’t seem ready to fight; rather, she seemed confused. She stepped back into the marginally more warm interior of the compound, whose temperature reminded Erik so much of his long years in captivity, and said, her voice gentling, “Laura?”

Out peeked out a girl.

About five years old, was Erik’s first thought based on the last time he’d been around children in any great quantity, but she had the thin, gangly frame of the malnourished, so maybe a little older, six or seven perhaps. She had dark hair and large, dark eyes and reminded him powerfully of someone. It took a moment to place her features—Logan, the rough-and-tumble fighter who’d called Older Charles _Chuck_. He wondered briefly at the folly of someone having a child at the end of the world, then shook it off. She’d survived this far, hadn’t she? He must be doing something right.

“What are you doing here, Laura?” Jean probed softly. He could see the teacher in her, the way he could see it in Charles, in how she knelt down to Laura’s level and looked her in the eye. “Shouldn’t you be at dinner with the others?”

Laura shook her head, but she was staring—at Erik. She took a step forward. Erik watched her hesitantly; it had been so long since he’d been around a child, and had he ever been any good as a teacher in the first place? He wasn’t Charles, he wasn’t Jean—

 _“Eres realmente Magneto?_ ” she asked, and he blinked.

 _“Soy Magneto,”_ he said slowly. The Spanish pronunciation of his chosen name came haltingly to his tongue, but it was nothing compared to the confusion of facing down this little girl and hearing her ask after a name that, in his time, only his once-friends and the US government knew.

She nodded gravely, then darted forward and hugged him.

He froze, his hand hovering over her back, afraid to touch her in case he hurt her, somehow, but quick as she was there she was gone, moving briskly back down the hall in a way that was more slink than pitter-patter. Jean was watching him with a faint smile on her face.

“Hard as it may be to believe, you were loved here,” Jean said. “As beloved as the professor.”

Erik blinked after her, and in spite of himself, heat gathered in his eyes. _As beloved as the Professor._ He allowed himself to remember the way Older Charles—every inch of him _the Professor_ , the title Jean and the others pronounced with such reverence—had reached out to him, had soothed his vicious nightmares, had eased the bite of the past five years from where it had dug into his skin. As beloved as the Professor, and perhaps beloved by the Professor again.

The last thing he’d expected to find in this world was hope.

Out of the corner of his eyes, colors flashed. Jean turned her head to see what had caught his attention and froze; in the distance, somewhere beyond the thick, wild forests that surrounded the mountainside compound, multicolored sparks glittered in the air. “That’s a distress signal,” she said, already moving quickly down the hallway, not quite a sprint but close to it. He followed her instinctively, glancing back over his shoulder to watch the colors glitter like stars in the velvet stretch of night.

She shoved open the cafeteria doors and announced to a startled cluster of mutants, “It’s the scavenging party; they’re under attack. We have to go, _now._ ”

The Professor’s face immediately fell into grim lines. He wheeled away from the table, saying briskly, “Logan—get Hank, tell him to prepare the ‘copter. Jean, gather anyone in fighting condition.” He looked at Charles, Raven, Alex. “I’m sorry; I’d hoped there would be more time to prepare you. But if you want to help, now is the time.”

Raven nodded instantly. “I’m in.”

Alex was slower, but he glanced in Jean’s direction where she was speaking hurriedly to the woman who’d given Raven a tour earlier—Psylocke—and said, “Me too.”

The Professor looked at Erik, and the _I’m sorry_ aimed in his direction was so obvious that Erik wasn’t quite sure if he’d projected it or merely _looked_ at him with those blue, blue eyes. “Are you ready, Erik?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said, and hoped that the Professor wasn’t looking for a lie.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In a deleted _First Class_ scene, Charles chastises Alex, “In the field, you could've killed one of your teammates!" 😬 Yikes, Charles.
> 
> Laura uses the “tú” form because she’s a little wild.


	13. 2012: Leviticus

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2012.

The man who is now Magneto can sense them from the metal they’re wearing long before they come into sight—zippers, bra hooks, carabiners, straps. They’re dressed like Westerners, padded thickly in layers, except for one, but she’s wearing a pair of boots and jeans anyway—

Jean.

She visits him, sometimes. About once a year they take tea halfway down the mountain. She tells him about her students, about her useless fool of a husband, about her friends. He tells her about the harvest, about the children that had been children when she’d left the village and are now teenagers playing at precociousness, about Stray and Shadow, about the steady watch of the eagle that has made its nest across from his. But this is the first time she’s brought friends. Instinctively, he casts out with his metal-sense for the struts and internal wiring of an advanced wheelchair—but no. Of course not. Even with teleportation, of course not.

“Magneto,” she says, beaming, as he approaches. He grunts at her. “It’s so _good_ to see you.”

He casts a gimlet eye over their number. Jean is the same as always, bright and vivid against the beauty of the mountainside, dressed casually in a t-shirt advertising some kind of band that probably hadn’t been formed the last time he’d listened to popular music. Behind her, muffled thickly in cold-weather gear, is a man wearing a reddish visor—her no-good husband, Scott, who he had technically met before at the White House—and another man with blue skin. For a moment, he feels a pang of remembrance—himself and Charles and Raven, back when they’d been a unit, the three of them on behalf of mutantkind—before he pushes it away. Blue—that was the teleporter, wasn’t it?

“What do you want,” he asks bluntly as he sets the firewood he’d gone out to gather down.

“To talk to you,” Jean says, falsely bright. Magneto snorts.

“So talk. But whatever it is, I’m not doing it.”

“Why are we here, Jean?” the useless husband asks.

“Because he can help. And he _will_ help,” Jean says stubbornly. “Sit down, everyone.” She sits cross-legged on the floor and the others follow, moving gingerly because of the bulk of their gear. “Magneto—you must have heard about the Sentinels.”

Ah, yes. The Sentinels.

“Yes,” he says mildly. “Bad news has a way of traveling.”

“Bad enough when we thought it was just a discriminatory way to enforce discriminatory laws,” Jean says. “But we’ve received credible information that it’s more than that. Mystique, from the Brotherhood of Mutants—” and he starts to hear the chosen name of a woman he’d once known so well fall from Jean’s lips, who he still thinks of as a rather callow girl, innocent of the weight of history that single name carried, pronouncing it like Magneto didn’t know who she was, hadn’t _made_ her who she was— “she showed us the plans. TRASK has been meeting with world governments to consider ‘the mutant problem.’”

“I’ve heard that before,” Magneto mutters in spite of himself.

“I know,” Jean says, who has seen his tattoo. “That’s why I knew you would understand—that even if you didn’t want to help, you would understand. They’ve spread _everywhere_ over since their introduction two years ago, and now they’re integral to a plan so terrible we can’t see the full scope of it, just the edges. They’re planning something terrible, Magneto, something with devastating consequences for all of us.” She swallows and at once there are tears in her eyes and Magneto abruptly remembers that Jean is _not_ a callow girl, not anymore, but old enough to be someone’s mother, had she not devoted her life to teaching the way that Charles had. “And not just us—the children, too. So when I tell you that we need your help—I know you’ll help. I know you’ll have no choice but to help.”

Damn her. Magneto rubs ruefully at his stubble. “How _can_ I help, Jean?” he asks. “I’m no fighter, not anymore.”

“The makeup of a Sentinel is a carefully-guarded secret,” Jean says. “But they’re made of metal. If you can take one down, one of our scientists—Beast, or Forge, or Hijack, they’re all brilliant—one of them can take it apart, figure out how it works. Create a signal to stop them all at once or a device that can take them out one by one.” Her eyes glitter with conviction and he almost smiles. It’s not himself he sees in her, though, in her hopeless naïveté and strength.

“And what would Charles think of you coming to me?” he asks softly, the question that’s been riding on the tip of his tongue since she first made herself at home in his space and sat down.

Jean looks at him for a long time. “Magneto,” she says, soft, like she knows how difficult this will be for him, “I’m just an envoy. This was the Professor’s idea.”

— ⓧ —

DC, _again._ It feels like his world is spinning tightly and more tightly around this place, that every step he takes away from it traces a circle to lead him back here, as inevitable as fate. Where he had stepped, shivering, still cold from the death-grip of the Atlantic, onto dry land under the brilliant blue eyes and warming-blanket promises of Charles Xavier that he wasn't alone anymore, it had been in this city. When he'd actually tried to commit the crime he'd been imprisoned for and discovered that a two-month dalliance had somehow resulted in grown children, it had been in this city. When he'd been held for twenty-seven years and tortured—

And now he here is again, attempting to stop an unwarranted attack on mutants, which is what he had _actually_ been imprisoned for, with a team of young hopefuls and Charles Xavier keeping a watchful eye on him from Cerebro in Westchester. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

He glances at Jean. She’s proud and beautiful in her X-Men uniform, her flaming red hair streaming out behind her. They used to call her the Red Ghost in the village. He’s grateful that she’s by his side; there’s another team, he knows, breaking into a military installation on the other side of the country, and Charles could have just as easily assigned her there. He almost sees it as a sign of goodwill, that the only person he would call a friend in the last twenty years is at his side, because certainly there had been nothing in Charles’s voice, steady and calm and not at all like the prim, easily riled Charles Xavier he’d known, to hint at welcome or that he’d been missed.

(”Hello, Erik,” Charles had said over the comm link, and those had been the first and only words he’d spoken to his former lover in twenty-two years. 

“Charles,” Magneto had said, and tried not to do the math about the last time he’d waited so long to speak to him again. And it really had felt like _waiting_ , like all his years in isolation were simply a suspension of his true self until the moment Charles Fucking Xavier looked at him and restored him. Damn him, even completely bald, the man’s eyes are the same. Exactly the same.)

“Logan’s team is poised for infiltration,” Charles says. “Scott, the demonstration about which we’re concerned will be in private—not the White House lawn this time, but one of the sub-basements.”

The useless husband nods briskly and glances down to the holographic map being projected from the gizmo with which Hank has supplied him. “Looks like it’s below the East Wing. Now, we could take one of the concealed entrances…”

Jean smiles. “Let’s let them know we’re coming.” She manifests a massive psionic fist and pounds on the front door. Magneto has never wished that he’d been there for the school while she’d been growing up there more.

— ⓧ —

Charles’s first sign that something’s gone terribly wrong is when Quicksilver saunters into the top office at the Nevada base and then goes blazing back out, abandoning Kurt and Logan and Kitty without so much as a word as to where he’s going. _Peter?_ Charles reaches out, but Peter’s already not there anymore; he can use Cerebro to latch onto him, but only if he concentrates, and Peter’s mind is slippery to begin with, moving too quickly for him to catch up unless he pours a great deal of energy into slowing him down first. Kitty ventures into the office herself and begins searching; she’s not as fast as Peter, of course, but no one is. Unhappy, Charles turns his focus back to the White House—and they’ve lost Jean.

Scott wants to keep looking for her, but Storm reminds him that Jean, of all of them, can take care of herself best, and so they press on, unhappily. Charles flits between their minds, carefully skirting the fourth member of their little team. Erik he watches almost obsessively through his students’ eyes, but he’s on comms as well as in their heads for a reason, and that reason is Erik Lehnsherr and his promise to never, ever, attempt to get inside his head again. Too sweet, too seductive, too utterly poisonous.

They get to the demonstration room where whatever new horror TRASK has cooked up for them awaits, and are confronted with the President, sputtering furiously at the sudden appearance of X-Men, a handful of Secret Servicemen with weapons drawn, whom Erik lazily disarms with a sweep of his hand, Trask himself… and Stryker. 

_Remind him,_ he tells Ororo, _no killing_. Storm places a hand on Erik’s shoulder and Charles watches him relax slowly, by increments. He’s wearing a well-fitting suit, perhaps the one he hadn’t worn to Jean’s wedding; he’d refused the X-Men uniform, and Charles… is both relieved and slightly offended. It’s all-black and far less hideous than the yellow-and-blue thing Hank had concocted for them all those years ago, which Erik had worn happily enough at the time. What, had his sense of fashion sharpened during his _years in prison?_

“Ah,” Trask says, smiling. “The X-Men. The guests of honor, here at last.”

“We’re here to send a message, Bolivar,” Scott says. These speeches come naturally to him now, and Charles is proud of the man he’s become, even if, for whatever reason, this feels like too large a moment for Scott’s words. “That no matter what you do, mutants will survive to stand against you. Whatever these new Sentinels are for, whatever you have planned… the X-Men will fight to keep the world safe from the likes of you, mutants and humans alike.”

“Mr. President,” Trask says, silky-soft, “two years ago, we introduced the Sentinels as peacekeeping artificial intelligences that could adapt to any mutation. The next step in mutant policing. Today, we demonstrate the next natural step in that evolution: the ability for Sentinels to _track_ mutants, to identify every mutant in the room. Even if they’re pretending to be something they’re not.”

He presses a button on a remote, and at once, the Sentinels standing behind him power up. They’re still the hulking black shapes out of bad dreams, but their movement is smoother now, more uncanny in its swiftness, and as one, they turn to Scott, Ororo, and Erik, their helmets glowing with suppressed plasma fire, their long, nightmarish fingers flexing, ready to snap necks.

 _Professor_ , Kitty thinks, and the urgency snaps him back to Nevada. _We think we know where Peter went._

She sends him a memory—her own fingers rifling through files until she uncovered one reading PREEMPTIVE EXTERMINATION OF OMEGA-LEVEL THREATS, Logan turning to her and asking, “Isn’t Pete’s sister Omega-level?” and the cold rush of understanding that had chilled Kitty’s blood—

Erik’s thrown up a hand and the Sentinels have stopped, turned away, focused instead on the humans in the room, and Scott is shouting at him, but Trask doesn’t seem worried. Trask is smiling. “We thought,” he is saying to the President, who’s swearing and cowering behind one of the Secret Servicemen, “that, as a special favor to you, we would begin this presentation of how we might move forward with global mutant internment with a targeted elimination of Omega-level threats to humankind. General Stryker?”

“Ten. Nine. Eight,” Stryker says.

 _Professor_ , Kitty thinks urgently, her fingers spread over a blueprint of Cerebro.

Logan spins to Kurt. “Get the Prof outta there, kid—”

—and Kurt is gone—

“Seven. Six. Five.”

In a panic, Charles slams into Bolivar Trask’s mind, and what he sees there makes him cry out— _Retreat,_ he shouts at the White House team, and Ororo and Scott, good students that they are, are hardwired to follow orders delivered in that mental tone, but Erik doesn’t flinch, and of course he can’t hear him, of course he hadn’t wound himself through Erik’s brain the way he had with Scott and Ororo and Jean—oh, god, Jean—

“Four. Three. Two.”

Kurt shudders into existence inside Cerebro and in a flash has his arms around Charles and the chair, and he wants to protest, needs to speak— “Retreat!” he shouts, and this time Erik starts, having gotten the message, “Get out of there, it’s a trap!”—

“One.”

And Kurt flashes him away. He gets one last moment of clarity from the helmet he’s still wearing—  
  
  
  
—as a small child in China watches, her eyes huge and wide, at the streak of light approaching in the sky—  
  
  
  
—as Peter zooms along the streets of his childhood hometown, aching, striving to get to his Omega-level sister’s house, where her Omega-level son is visiting from college, and he turns the corner to a still portrait of rubble—  
  
  
  
—as Jean _screams_ in the Phoenix extraction chamber as the alien Shi’ar begin their work—  
  
  
  
—as the missile hits and flames eat up the school, Cerebro, and Charles’s chair where he’d been sitting just an instant before—  
  
  
  
—as a wave of weakness sweeps Erik and he shudders, goes down to one knee, and Trask smiles at him almost kindly, “Nano-Sentinels in the blood. Really, Mr. Lehnsherr, you don’t think we had you for all those years without ensuring that you wouldn’t be able to interfere with our plans, did you?”—  
  
  
  
—as the Sentinels in that small room return their focus to his students and his _Erik_ —  
  
  
  
—as the Sentinels steady their sights on every mutant, everywhere—  
  
  
  
—as the Sentinels, as one, _fire—_  
  
  
  
—and the rest of it he finds out later, when he wakes to a world where all his dreams have burned to so much ash.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	14. 2023: Useful, Valued, Helpless

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

They were ready to depart in what seemed to Charles like record time. Of course it made sense—their people were in trouble—but he still felt a little motion-sick with the activity rushing like river rapids around him.

On the level below the compound was an airplane hangar, where Jean, Logan, Hank, and the woman called Psylocke met their ragtag little party of time-travelers. The helicopter Xavier had referred to was small, and clearly patched together from the corpses of other vehicles—it was a tight squeeze, most of them standing upright in the back while Hank piloted from the front. With Logan’s help, Xavier hoisted himself in the copilot’s seat. Charles made to get on the plane, but was stopped by a pair of—good god, _claws_ —shooting out of Logan’s knuckles and burying themselves in the doorframe, barring Charles from getting any closer.

“You shouldn’t come with us,” Logan said, not ungently. “You don’t have your powers.”

He’s _in a wheelchair_ , Charles wanted to shout, and indeed thought it loudly enough that judging by Xavier’s wince he’d managed to project it in spite of whatever Hank’s serum was doing to his powers. “I am _not_ letting you go without me,” he said instead. “My—” _My Erik_ — “my sister is going to face down mutant-killing robots—”

“You never seemed to care when I went on missions before, Charles,” Raven said coolly.

Erik seemed torn. And Charles recognized that expression, the one he always wore when breaking the news to Charles that he and the others would be leaving soon to free another group of mutants being held captive, to burn another experimental facility to the ground, mingled desire to have Charles with him, fighting side-by-side like they had been in Cuba, like he knew Erik had always imagined for their future, and relief that he would be safe. “Charles—” he began.

“Shut up,” he snapped, not sure whether Erik was planning to tell him to stay or speak up on his behalf, but sure that either way he didn’t want to hear it.

“Charles will stay in the helicopter with me and Beast,” Xavier said, and that seemed to end it. Even Charles, who by all means shouldn’t be intimidated by _himself_ , closed his mouth and accepted that it was the best he was going to get, because… Logan had a point, at the moment he was only human, and not even battle-trained the way Raven was at that. At least this way he could keep an eye on the battle, he could—he didn’t know what. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to relax at the compound while his friends and sister and _Erik_ were risking their lives, even if he couldn’t fight with them either.

It was a lot like being in a wheelchair again, actually.

“Fine,” Logan grunted, and resheathed his claws. Charles tried to shake off the instinctive fascination as he climbed on the helicopter. He grasped the strap hanging from the ceiling next to Erik, struggling valiantly to ignore the heat of Erik’s body next to his own as Old Hank finished the preflight checks and lifted them into the air.

Jean tossed leather-like bodysuits like the kind the warriors from the future were wearing at the four of them; Charles was confused about why he was getting one when it had been so clearly established that he was staying on the helicopter until the first blast of cold air struck him outside. They had to be very, very far north; the wind wasn’t bad, the helicopter barely swaying under Old Hank’s expert piloting, but the chill cut straight through him anyway. They skirted the tops of dark evergreens on their way to what Charles could now see were colored lights flashing almost prettily in the air a fair distance away from them. Snow flew into his face, into his teeth—was it winter now? It had been summer when they’d left for the future—

Logan sniffed the air and bared his teeth. “Damn it,” he growled, and made his way to a storage compartment next to where Raven was standing. He flipped it open with his claws and said, sharply, “Come out of there.”

A little girl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, glared up at them from her hiding place. Erik startled. “Laura?” he said, so softly that no one but Charles could hear it; Charles shot him a look, but his attention was quickly drawn away to where Logan was coaxing the girl out of the storage container.

“Damn it, girl, you know you’re not allowed on missions,” he growled.

“I can _help_ ,” she said, voice warbling into a wail. “ _Soy fuerte. Puedo sanar_. Like you.”

“Do you remember what we talked about?” Logan said. His voice was low, which Charles supposed was what passed for gentleness with him. “How the Sentinels can become any metal, even…”

 _“El adamantio_ ,” she said sullenly.

“They can hurt us, kiddo,” he said. “And we need you to stay behind when I go, so that you can protect the others. Especially the kids.”

“We can’t turn around,” Old Hank said from where he was bent over the controls. “We’re over halfway there already.”

“You stay in the chopper, you understand me?” Logan said, his voice severe again. “Don’t you dare set a foot outside, or _I_ will kill you. _Understand_ me?”

“No,” Laura said stubbornly.

“I’ll watch her,” Charles found himself volunteering. If he wasn’t going to be allowed to fight, at least he could do something useful.

Logan looked relieved, but wary. “You sure, Chuck? She’s a handful.”

“I used to run a school,” Charles said. “I can handle it. And don’t call me _Chuck._ ”

From the copilot’s seat, Xavier let out a rusty laugh. “She’ll be all right with us, Logan,” he said, and Logan nodded and bodily lifted the girl to strap her into one of the fold-out seats, in spite of her squirming. She was just secure when Hank’s console beeped ominously and he sucked in a breath.

“Sentinel carrier at four o’clock. Looks like the scavenging party just encountered a patrol, but they’re sending the big guns to deal with them.”

“If it was just one Sentinel, they might still be alive,” Jean said briskly. She put a hand on Erik’s shoulder and pointed to what at first looked like a flat shadow ghosting across the treeline. “That’s the Sentinel carrier. There are likely two hundred Sentinels on that thing. We’ll help Logan and the others get the scavenging team into the chopper, and then you and I are going to try and take it down.”

Erik nodded brusquely. And Charles wanted to protest, wanted to tell him not to risk himself, that he needed to come back alive for him, all the things he pressed into Erik’s mind before he went on a mission—but that wasn’t his place anymore, if it had ever been. So he turned away and watched Raven and Psylocke lower a rope ladder down out of the helicopter instead.

“Approaching jump point,” Old Hank said. “Get ready.”

A moment of hushed breath and then Hank said, “Go,” and Logan had bounded out of the helicopter before it had even come to a hovering stop. Jean was next, one arm around Alex and one arm around Psylocke—and _oh,_ she could use her telekinesis to fly, wasn’t that something—and then Erik followed her out with the trick he’d learned one sunny day at the mansion involving his own magnetic field and the natural pull of the earth, and then _Raven was falling_ , but she caught a tree branch on her way down and swung neatly into an arc that left her perched on the branch, bounding downward in long, quick strides, and he’d never seen her like this, never seen her _move_ like this, like the warrior she’d become. Charles watched them go with his heart in his throat and only remembered Laura when she began clawing at her seat belt, trying to free herself. “Stop that,” he said, trying to sound stern, but only succeeding in sounding sympathetic; he knew that longing, to go and fight with the people he loved, and he thought perhaps he might have been the ideal choice to look after her for that reason alone.

“They’re through the treeline,” Xavier said. He wasn’t looking at anyone, his gaze turned outward into the dark, but Charles felt that the narration was at least a little for his benefit—his and Laura’s. “They’ve found the others. They’re… still alive—Eva has trapped the Sentinel in a time bubble, very clever—it won’t last forever, but it’s bought them all some time.” His voice seemed soaked in relief, and Charles—remembered, or maybe considered for the first time that all of them were Xavier’s students and friends. He tried to imagine the threat of losing Alex or Sean or, god forbid, _Raven_ ten or twelve times over and shuddered, put it firmly out of his mind.

“Erik has it contained—he’s—” Xavier trailed off, seeming to struggle for words. Then his voice dropped into a grimmer register. “Erik senses Sentinels inbound.”

Xavier was inside Erik’s head. He was reading his senses, feeling what Erik felt—that intangible metal-sense that had always been so tantalizing when Charles had occupied that space himself.

Charles felt cold and numb and tired, and it wasn’t just the temperature outside, either; it was the promise he’d made to himself, to never again venture inside that head, and how the passage of years seemed to make a mockery of the fury and fire he’d felt at what Erik had done, at the way he’d _suffered_. Xavier, oblivious—it seemed that the serum was useful at preserving what little dignity he had left, in addition to its two declared purposes of allowing him to walk again and stopping the bloody mental pain—was saying, his voice taut, “They won’t have time to make it back before the Sentinels are on them. They’ll have to engage.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Charles asked hesitantly. “It’s what you brought Erik here to do.”

But Xavier just looked at him darkly and Charles felt a chill sink through him. If he’d lost Erik irrevocably so long ago, why then was he so afraid of what might happen to him now?

— ⓧ —

A Sentinel, Erik thought, looked like it had walked straight out of his boyhood nightmares. They had long, owl-like faces attached to blunt metallic bodies, with disproportionately long limbs that seemed to be designed for snatching children out of their beds. They were exactly what, as a child, he’d imagined the _schwarze Mann_ to look like, down to the blankness of their expressions, the terrible redness of their eyes. The girl with white streaks in her black hair seemed to have frozen it in a blueish bubble; it crouched, crackling with potential energy, poised to charge down at them. “Hurry,” she said through gritted teeth. “It’s already started to move. I can’t hold it much longer—”

Erik felt for the metal outlines of its shape, but there was some kind of interference— “What is that?” he asked, baffled.

“Time,” Jean said. “Eva can speed it up in localized bubbles. Of course, Sentinels don’t rust away. But she was instrumental in building the machine we used to come get you.” She knelt by the girl’s side. “Eva, just a little longer, okay? Psylocke is getting Jubilee and Proudstar out now—”

But Eva cried out and collapsed, and the Sentinel sprang forward, its arm narrowed into a spike ready to kill—

Erik flung out a hand, and it stopped.

But it wasn’t—easy. Abruptly, Erik felt like a child again, when the simplest of tasks, moving a coin, seemed as impossible and painful as lifting a city bus. The Sentinel moved in quick, jerky movements, skipping forward like a damaged film strip, and Erik cried out with the effort of keeping it contained—he hadn’t tried to use his powers since Charles had broken him out. He hadn’t tested himself to see whether the long years of deprivation and pain had damaged him—he hadn’t needed to—he’d known he was damaged, known that he wasn’t going to be enough. The Sentinel tried to twist out of his control and he screamed—was this what it was like for Charles, having control over something with a mind of its own—he staggered backwards and the Sentinel leapt for him—

At his side, Jean made a sharp gesture and the Sentinel went flying. Jean grabbed him and dragged him to his feet. “We don’t have much time,” she said sharply, “it’ll be back, and vibranium this time, and my telekinesis won’t be able to do that again. Are you all right?”

Erik nodded, but he had a feeling that she was really asking a different question entirely— _can you do this_ —and that one he didn’t have an answer for at all. His hard-won control, the months of bending bullets, _somewhere between rage and serenity_ , all the years before that he’d spent honing his powers, passing that coin over his fingers again and again until he could do it in his sleep—it had all fled from him. His mind felt raw and wild and he wanted Charles, he wanted Charles to take his hand and show him his mother and guide this formless rage and pain into something productive. “I don’t know,” he gasped in response to her unspoken question, and her expression shuttered.

After a moment, she unbent and said, “Okay, okay. If we can get the others to the chopper before the carrier arrives, Logan and I—”

“Too late,” Erik said, feeling wretched and broken. “I can feel them. Dozens, a hundred of them inbound; they’ll be here any moment.”

Jean sucked in a breath. “Okay. Okay. We’ll have to take out the carrier, then. If we can destroy the central control, the Sentinels will disintegrate—it’s not ideal, it won’t leave us anything to study—” _and that’s why you’re here, to catch a Sentinel for us, to control yourself long enough to ensure our survival_ , she didn’t say, but Erik still _heard_ , loud and clear, as though he were a telepath himself, “—but it’ll leave us alive long enough to get back to the base and see what we can do about your powers.”

“And who do you expect to lose in that assault?” Erik asked softly. Jean didn’t say anything, which was how he knew.

He swallowed. In the distance, he heard the trees thrash as the Sentinel, twice as tall as a human, made its way back to them. “Take care of that one,” he told her, and before she could protest he was in the air. At least he could still fly, he thought, but though it should’ve been bitter, it wasn’t—flight had been the first thing that Charles had helped him discover, the first thing that wasn’t purely destructive, and he cherished it almost as much as the memory that had unsealed his ability to move mountains of metal.

He shot towards the Sentinel transport, through a swarm of Sentinels coming down, and though they turned to him, he was too quick, like a bullet, like a predatory bird. He directed himself to the heavy plane of metal that was bearing down on them, and wished that, like Charles, he could feel the people he was leaving behind, that he could be assured of their safety.

He wished for Charles. Holding him safe in his mind, in his heart.

Erik crashed his way into the Sentinel carrier going seventy-five miles an hour.

— ⓧ —

Xavier jerked. “Erik—no—” he gasped.

 _No._ Charles’s heart pounded a terrified tattoo against his ribcage.

At that moment, Psylocke shoved a woman with short black hair that was going white at the roots onto the helicopter, and Raven helped up a man with black smears of—was that war paint?—across his eyes. In the distance, he could see the uncontrolled fire of Alex’s energy blasts, blue bubbles that seemed to stall the incoming shadows for a second, he heard Logan’s cry of mingled pain and fury, he heard Jean shouting. In the helicopter, Xavier was fumbling with his belt, Old Hank trying to restrain him. “Don’t be stupid, Professor,” he was saying frantically. “You can’t go out there—”

“He’s going to get himself killed—” Xavier snapped.

 _No. No._ Without knowing what he was doing, Charles was climbing down the rope ladder, leaving Laura in the hands of the mutants they’d just rescued. He came to himself halfway down, but couldn’t bring himself to regret it—Erik was going to do something _insane_ , and he was the only one who’d ever managed to talk Erik out of his insanity, even if his success rate was closer to a coin toss than any kind of certainty—and Erik was mad and Erik was cruel but Erik _could not_ be dead, he would not accept it, that was what Jean had played on to get him to accept this mission, after all, the threat of losing Erik irrevocably. He heard Raven call after him, but he didn’t care—there were still mutants in trouble, and where there were mutants in trouble, Erik would be in the thick of it. That, at least, he’d never doubted about his ex-love.

He dodged a faceless, awful creature that could only be a Sentinel, which went after him until it was distracted by Logan slashing at its sides—fascinating, that they could sense the X-gene even when Hank had suppressed it so thoroughly—and plunged into the trees. He tracked the fight by the direction of Alex’s plasma beams, but the Sentinels, too, were shooting something red and glowing at their adversaries, and Logan screamed when one brushed against his forearm; Charles threw himself out of the way of one such blast and watched with faint horror as it melted partly through a tree trunk.

“Erik!” he called out, wishing, again, wholeheartedly this time, for his powers, wishing he could latch onto that mind that had never stopped being bright and beautiful even when he’d hated it most, turned around and around again trying to catch sight of his sharp features, his terrible beauty.

Jean seized his arm and dragged him out of the way of another plasma blast. “What are you doing?!” she shouted at him.

“Erik—where is he—?!”

Jean bit her lip and he knew, then, that he was too late, that Erik was already doing the insane and terrible thing. “He went up to the Sentinel carrier,” she said, words tumbling out one after another, like she knew that Charles was screaming to get inside her mind and _know_ , just know. “I think he’s going to try to blow the control console—”

Charles turned to where the shadow of the Sentinel carrier inched slowly toward them, like a great bird of prey. “Get me up there,” he said.

“Charles—”

“You have telekinesis, don’t you?” he snapped. _“Get me up there!”_

But movement at the corner of his eye froze him. Above him, a Sentinel reared up and aimed its spiked hands at him, but that wasn’t what had caught his attention; above the treeline, the Sentinel carrier— _bucked_ , and shuddered, and then collapsed in on itself like a dying star.

The Sentinel petrified, its spike seconds from Charles’s heart.

“Magneto,” Jean breathed, and Charles cried, “Erik!” and the world blazed red for a second as the carrier shattered into a ball of flame.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	15. 2012-2017: Deuteronomy

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2012.

What Charles can’t quite understand is why Erik _stays._

At first it’s a matter of survival, of course. Erik weak and feverish, whatever the nano-Sentinels had done to his body throwing off his equilibrium, and he spends more time delirious in the back of the Blackbird than he does barking orders or resembling the young strategic thinker and general that Charles once knew. But once he recovers—mostly, he still falters every now and then when he tries to use his powers and they fail him, and the most _awful_ expression flits over his face—he still stays. He bandages wounds. He keeps meticulous track of where pockets of mutant resistance have sprung up in the absence of Cerebro. He holds Jean’s hand when she sobs in pain, a pain she describes as being like having an organ and a handful of ribs torn out of her body instead of an unimaginable cosmic force that Charles was always dubious of to begin with (but no longer, once he sees the shell of the woman Jean has been reduced to without it).

Erik sifts through the rubble of the school with them. Takes up a shovel to dig graves for the children, which is more than what Charles can do. Kneels down over the soft piles of dirt, another mass grave (far from his first) and lays a hand on the overturned soil and whispers a prayer that Charles understands even without his telepathy: may their memories be a blessing.

The Brotherhood flock to him, as though he hadn’t completely gone off the grid for twenty years, and he sees Raven in person for the first time in years, for the first time not on the other side of a battlefield in even longer. Charles can hardly complain—their numbers have been devastated. His best estimate is that roughly 25% of the mutant population have been shuttled into work camps, with 8% having been killed in the first wave against powerful mutants. And those statistics are increasing all the time. They’ve lost their home base; whenever they bed down for too long, the Sentinels come and raze it all to the ground. 

And Erik is the same as ever. Brisk, no-nonsense; when Charles wants to just curl up in a ball and die, Erik is there, taking over for him, gathering intelligence on where they can scavenge food, organizing watches, figuring out whose powers are best suited to hold off the Sentinels so the others can make a quick escape. He’s still as clever and quick and decisive as ever, and Charles finds that he can fade into the background every now and then without people looking at him for the answers he doesn’t have, which is a tremendous relief.

— ⓧ —

Hank doesn’t like it. “Why is he still here?” he demands of Charles one day when Erik comes to him with a request to expand the tracking software on the Blackbird that is frankly, Charles thinks, not unreasonable.

“It’s hardly as though we can turn down the help, Hank,” Charles says wearily. He wants a drink. Unfortunately, he doesn’t think he can blame the return to addictive behavior on Erik and his proximity this time.

“I know that,” Hank fumbles. “It’s just… I worry about you, Charles. The way you look at him sometimes…”

“What?” Charles asks, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous register. Hank subsists, but not for long; the perils of being Charles’s oldest and truest friend.

“I know that… dangerous men can be…” Hank says awkwardly, “… _enticing_ , but you deserve better than that, Charles.”

“I’m not fucking Erik,” Charles snaps.

“I didn’t think you were,” Hank says. “I just think you’re still in love with him.”

Charles splutters. “Absurd,” he says, his voice chilly, a hard note in it he’s never turned on a student before but which Hank is well-used to. “I haven’t forgotten, Hank. I know what he did. You would do well to remember what I did in return.”

Hank nods briskly and turns back to the Blackbird, muttering to himself about Magneto and his presumption and his demands like nothing had happened at all.

— ⓧ —

Of course, that night, because he’s always had appalling timing, Erik knocks on his door on the old abandoned asylum they’re staying at in rural Massachusetts. When Charles answers it, curious and half-dreading news that another scouting party hasn’t returned, it’s to a tentative smile. Erik holds up a portable chess set, probably scavenged from the institution’s game room. “Fancy a game?” he says, and Charles was always weak to the note of hope in that voice, so he opens the door and lets Erik in.

— ⓧ —

For the next couple of months, Charles feels like he’s living two lives. In the first, he’s Professor Charles Xavier, leader of the X-Men and their pillar of hope even in the darkest times. He has an uneasy understanding with the Brotherhood of Mutants, but everyone knows it’s just temporary; as soon as they get this thing with the Sentinels sorted out, as soon as they can return to their normal lives, the Professor and Mystique will be back at each other’s throats, like nothing had changed at all. 

In the second, he’s just Charles, the betrayed former lover of a man who comes to him in the night with chess games and books, with strategy and just pure conversation like he’s never had with anyone else before. Erik is tentative and shy and somehow it’s more endearing than when he was the confident loner of their youth. His hair is gray now, a color as pure and somber as steel, but when Charles looks at him, when he says something funny or casually cruel that he can’t help laughing at, he sees _his_ Erik, the Erik of 1963. His eyes are the same of course, more heavily lined now, more likely to shade into green than gray, but still the same—sparkling with that terrible dry wit, brimming over with something that Charles had used to interpret as love.

Their conversation is stilted at first, logistical things about food and scout movements and how long they can reasonably stay here when TRASK is talking about sending up Sentinel satellites that will be able to detect a mutant from orbit—negotiations between allied leaders, not the chatter of friends, much less lovers—but Charles learns to defer to Erik’s tactical thinking and in return Erik teaches him the survival considerations he’d taken up as a hermit and slowly their talk turns to other things, other realms. The contents of the tiny library they’ve scavenged from past hiding places. Charles falls into the old role of catching Erik up on the pop culture of the Anglophone world over the last forty years so he’ll know what the youngsters mean when they moan about Skynet and the Terminators. The children, though few of them are actual children anymore; the Sentinels saw to that.

It’s when he learns that Erik has been helping young Kitty Pryde patch the rough spots in her on-again, off-again relationship with Marie that he knows he’s lost, he’s lost, he’s lost.

— ⓧ —

2013.

It’s when they lose Ororo that it all comes to a head.

Charles breaks down and goes to Logan, who can sniff out a bottle of bourbon from four miles away (they’ve tested). He’s sitting in his tiny cabin at the defunct music camp they’d commandeered, that Ororo had died protecting, staring at the bottle of scotch Logan had retrieved for him, willing himself not to open it, weakening at every moment, and Erik comes and sits across from him, not pressing, just the warm presence of a mind that Charles locked away from himself a long time ago, and Charles snaps.

“Why are you still here?!” he says, a question that turns into a cry before its end. “Why haven’t you left yet? It’s what you do, isn’t it, you leave, you leave me alone—”

“Fuck you, Charles,” Erik snarls, but he doesn’t leave. He doesn’t leave.

“They’re not your students, they’re not your responsibility!”

“They’re not yours, either,” Erik returns, clipped, as cold with anger as Charles is burning hot right now. “They’re adults, in case you haven’t noticed, and yet you stay.”

“Because I don’t turn my back on the people I love!”

“ _Fuck_ you, Charles,” Erik spits out. “What do you know about it? What do you think I was doing that day in Dallas, besides protecting you?”

Charles laughs, a note bordering on the hysterical. “Protecting me? _Protecting_ me? You locked me out—”

“You wanted to be left out! You wanted to be able to deny the truth of how much they hated us, even then, you wanted to be able to pretend with your school, with your students, that nothing like this would ever come to pass! And I wanted—”

He cuts himself off, but Charles is suddenly hungry for him to continue, ravenous for the explanation he never got. “You wanted? Go on, Erik, what did you _want?_ ”

“I wanted to save a mutant,” Erik says, and it’s so unexpected that Charles falters.

“What do you mean?” Charles asks, his voice sounding very distant to his own ears.

Erik says, his voice as close and present as love, “She’s dead now, I suppose, so it doesn’t matter. The President’s wife—Jackie Kennedy—she was a mutant. They were aiming for her. I tried to deflect the shot, but,” a twist of his mouth, something trying to be wry but only ending up looking devastated, “I was never any good with bullets.”

Charles gapes at him, all his anger drained away. Erik looks abruptly embarrassed of having lost control, of confessing something that he never meant to confess—and _why_ , Charles has no idea, why would he let him believe, all these years—Erik stands, but he doesn’t leave. He says, instead, “And I tried, you know. After I left you at the school, all those years ago. I tried to leave you behind for good—to leave everything behind for good—but it didn’t work. So it seems you’re stuck with me.”

And then, at last, he turns on his heel and leaves a stunned Charles behind him trying desperately to believe that Erik meant something other than that he tried, and failed, to kill himself.

— ⓧ —

So he gets drunk. Drunk, his telepathy is muted, sloppy, but when he concentrates he’s still capable of more than any telepath he’s ever met save, once, Jean. He concentrates now, sending a slim tendril of thought into Erik’s mind. His shields are strong—strong enough that to take them down might mean permanent mental damage—though he doesn’t take it personally; there are a handful of other telepaths with them now, and he spent much of his time with Jean, after all. He reaches out to knock, to request entrance.

Except there’s already a door.

It’s locked, except just brushing against it Charles can tell—the key is shaped to his mind, his and no one else’s. A back door in Erik’s mind, after all this time, just in case. Just in case Charles ever betrayed himself and reached out, Erik would not have shut him out like he did for all those years he spent in prison, but would reach back. Charles fits his mind to the lock and slips inside, stealthy as shadow, longing for just a glimpse of that pristine, beautifully ordered mind in this moment of weakness, with one of his oldest and best students dead and the foundation he built the last fifty years of his life on shaken to rubble, and then he’ll request entrance properly, he swears, just a glimpse—

Except—

Erik’s mind, once so lucid and crisp, wavers now, and he can see the lurking remains of madness of a mind that was shattered and put back together, painstakingly, over the years, but imperfectly, like a mosaic broken and mostly pieced together again. He stands in the stained-glass remnants of the mind that he once knew so well like a fine powdery dust of broken glass on the floor and feels tears rolling down his cheeks at the evidence of _pain_ , pain like hellfire gnawing at the bones—he reaches out for a wend of scar tissue and gasps as he _sees_ —

—the glint of light off of Trask’s glasses as he leans over him, as Erik tries to scream but can’t catch his breath, his lung, there’s something wrong with his lungs, a staggering pain in the right side of his chest as the doctors deflate and reinflate his lung in turns—

—Stryker’s smirk as he hefts the plastic baton and Erik, wearily, raises his arms over his head, little defense though it is, he’s grown used to these beatings and bears them with a tired numbness but still, he wishes that Stryker would stay away from the broken ribs—

—the crack running down the blank, white wall that he’s stared at so long he thinks he can trace the contours it’s seared onto his own mind, it’s been what feels like years and no one has come, he’s tried everything, screaming, begging, casting out his mind in unforgivable weakness searching for Charles, Charles, Charles—

 _Charles?_ Erik-of-now thinks, surprised to feel Charles’s gossamer touch at the back of his mind, and at once Charles comes back to himself, tears sliding down his cheeks, gasping for breath and wishing that he were far, far drunker than he actually is.

— ⓧ —

2014.

Though he will regret this, almost as much as he regrets not coming for Erik in the first place (but never quite claiming place of pride; the scars in Erik’s mind run too deeply for him to ever forget his original sin, his first and most devastating failure), he doesn’t go to Erik immediately. He makes small overtures. An apple left for Erik after rations have been divvied up, a small way of saying that he notices how Erik, justifying it by saying that he’s used to a small and bland diet, takes the smaller portion for himself, gives Kitty the first pick at the rare kosher meals they can find. An invitation to play chess after a hard day, when they’ve lost someone, when the lines around Erik’s eyes weigh as heavily as the albatross around Charles’s own neck. Small things, things that seem inadequate for the wealth of feeling that bubbles up within him when he lays eyes on Erik. But small things seem to be all he’s capable of. Too little, too late, Raven— _Mystique—_ sneers at him once when she catches him mourning a member of the Brotherhood, one of his former students. It seems to be his motto in life.

But Erik never treats these gestures like they’re too little, too late. He smiles, a tiny, tremulous thing, at the apple, accepts the chess games a little too quickly to pretend that he’s wholly unaffected by Charles. It gives him hope, though most of his hope died long ago.

Society falls apart around them, but Charles and Erik drift back to each other. Slowly, slowly, with the deliberate beauty of a dance, or the spring thaw, or falling in love.

— ⓧ —

Erik teaches Illyana Rasputina how to use her portals not just for evacuation but for offense, her small blond form darting in between Sentinels to draw circles on the ground around them, dropping them into the remotest places on earth. Charles brings him a nightcap when the nights get longer, when the world gets colder.

Erik forces Eva Bell to produce time bubbles, again and again and again, until she can do it in her sleep, until she can do it on reflex, until her first instinct when she sees a Sentinel, even before screaming for help, is to freeze it in a bubble of time. Charles leaves a copy of _The Once and Future King_ by Erik’s bedroll, a ragged old thing that he’s carried from camp to camp ever since they holed up in that deserted library outside Tahoe, only able to part with it because he knows that Erik will treasure it, as he does the few material things he’s managed to hang on to through captivity and his hermetic years. 

Erik holds Jubilation as she sobs for her son, her perfectly human son, her son who she thought was safe because he didn’t have an X-gene, who would’ve been safe but for the way that his mother taught him not to stand back when atrocities were happening to other people.

And Charles kisses him one autumn night, just a dry press of lips, and Erik says nothing about it, and they continue on as they have been, each day pressing a little closer, each night lying beside each other and saying nothing, as thought to speak of it would break the spell, as though this thing they’ve found at the end of the world is too fragile, too fey, to burden with words.

Charles stops sleeping in a separate bunk and starts sleeping with his fingers intertwined with Erik’s, and everyone knows, but no one says anything, not even Hank. It’s the end of the world. Who will begrudge them their little happiness?

— ⓧ —

(What he will tell no one is that, in spite of the way moving around so much makes him ache now, in spite of the graves that have sprung up throughout America, following them like a twisted trail of friends left behind, Charles has not been so simply happy—so _at peace_ —since 1963. Erik is his again, this simple, spare life that has sprung up between Sentinel attacks. Erik lets Charles ride around in the back of his head—never commented-upon, not after that first time when he jolted to feel Charles rooting around in his skull, simply lets him wend himself into the struts and girders of his mind—lets Charles soothe his nightmares when they come, infrequent and hazy—lets Charles comfort him when they lose someone—lets Charles press their bodies together, heart to heart. Erik sometimes looks at him with such tremendous warmth that the apocalypse falls away and they are thirty again, giggling into each other’s mouths, debating hotly their competing ideas of what a mutant paradise would look like, as though it could have any resemblance to this bleak and barren future at all.)

— ⓧ —

2017.

When the world ended, same-sex marriage had been legal in New York for a year.

One day, Charles opens his eyes. Erik is gone already, undoubtedly risen to do the work of organizing their little refugee camp which is never done, but he’s let Charles sleep in for once, and Charles smiles muzzily and turns his head—

—and there, on Erik’s pillow, is a ring.

He takes it gingerly, holds it up to the light. It’s a mix of many metals, metals that Charles can’t name—he thinks he recognizes the copper sheen of a penny, the sleek tensile strength of steel—wound together, the separate strands melting into each other, helixes dancing around a man’s ring finger. His throat tight, he slides it onto his finger. It fits well.

 _How?_ he thinks. _Your powers…_

Erik, from where he’s watching breakfast happen, ready to break up any fights that might be sparked by short tempers and a shorter food supply, thinks, _I’ve been waiting for you for a long time._

Charles buries his head in his pillow and feels hot tears leak out, but for once they’re not tears of grief or despair. At the end of them, Erik Lehnsherr, cynic and misanthrope, had faith in him. And at the end of all things, he’s managed to give Charles something that might be described as approaching joy, if only because there are no words to encompass its scope.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	16. 2023: The Last Game

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

The explosion had knocked Charles backward, and he’d struck his head hard on a low-hanging branch. Jean, he would be told later, had anchored herself with her telekinesis, but hadn’t managed to reflexively grab hold of him before he was blown away; she’d apologized, genuinely remorseful, and Charles had shaken it off, the concussion making everything seem very vague and distant. The first thing he remembered was looking around the clearing that had been created by their fight and seeing little neat piles of ashes where the Sentinels had been standing. Dozens of them, most of them just-arrived, poised to annihilate them. Erik had acted just in time.

The next thing he remembered was being hauled onto the helicopter. He was saying something, but he wasn’t sure what. Xavier shook him sharply and said, “It’s all right, Charles. I can sense him. He’s about two miles northwest of us. It’s all right.” Charles remembered shutting up, but the words still eluded him.

The third thing he remembered before the world came rushing back in color and sound was the metal cocoon Erik had wrapped himself in before he’d wildly, without control, pulled all the metal of the Sentinel carrier to him and ripped it apart in a hailstorm of flying steel and titanium. He was shaking with exhaustion by the time they pulled him out, and Xavier frowned at him severely, and haltingly, more like an interrogation than an after-action report, the details spilled from his lips. He remembered Jean and Logan exchanging glances where Erik and Xavier couldn’t see them, but Charles could; he remembered the deep well of shame echoing in Erik’s voice.

The fourth thing he remembered was grasping Erik’s arm, tightly enough to hurt if Erik’s wince was anything to go by, and refusing to let go the entire helicopter ride home, the atmosphere a strange mix between celebratory—they’d faced down Sentinels without losing even one of their own, something Charles gathered was a rare event—and downtrodden—Erik’s powers were… and they’d invested so much time, so much energy, so much hope into him. Erik hunched and Charles could _feel_ his anger, his self-loathing, even if he couldn’t feel much of anything anymore thanks to the serum. The wind whipped coldly between them, but Charles didn’t let go. He didn’t let go.

The fifth thing he remembered was asking Blink dizzily if he was allowed to sleep with a concussion. “Urban myth,” she said kindly, and tucked him in. The last thing he remembered was darkness.

— ⓧ —

The Professor found Erik sitting on the edge of the bed in the room where he’d crashed immediately after arriving in the future—yet another thing to fuel the fire of self-loathing that was burning dimly in the pit of his stomach, Erik thought with disgust. When had he become so _weak_? Had five years of captivity really unmanned him so?

A squeak of wheels outside the room, and a gentle knock. Erik closed his eyes. It could only be one person, and though it was the man Erik wanted most to see in the world, it wasn’t the _right_ man.

“This is your room, isn’t it?” Erik asked. “Come in, then.”

The Professor pushed the door open and wheeled inside, a faint smile on his face. “It is my room,” the Professor said. “Which means it’s yours as well.”

“Even though I’m dead here?” Erik asked bluntly. The Professor’s expression faltered, and Erik cursed himself again. It seemed, once more, that all he was capable of was inflicting pain.

“Even so,” the Professor said, his voice threaded through with melancholy. “How are you doing, Erik?”

“Can’t you tell?”

The Professor surveyed him. Then said, unbearably tender, “Let’s play a game.”

He led Erik to what must have passed for a study or a library now in these desperate times, where an old, battered chessboard, carefully clear of dust, stood mid-game. Erik ran a finger over the pieces, saw where they had been meticulously taken care of, even though the other player had long passed. For the first time, he ached for this Charles, who had lost someone he clearly loved dearly, even if he couldn’t quite imagine a way that his own Charles would become this creature who had so obviously forgiven him so very long ago. “How long ago…?”

“Last year,” the Professor said. He, too, ran a questing finger over the pieces, locked forever in a game that would never be finished. It was too much like what Erik had always imagined the study at home (no, not his home, not anymore—and wasn’t that the problem with placing your sense of home in someone else’s hands, they could always make you an exile again) might look like if he died on a mission. A chess game, always half-played, never finished. Then the Professor began resetting the board with sure, deft movements.

“But—” Erik protested, “that was the last piece of someone you—you—” He couldn’t say it. It was so far from the truth, at least in his time, that the words faded to ash in his mouth.

The Professor turned to him, and he could see Charles in those blue, blue eyes. “ _You,”_ he said gently, “are the last piece of the man I loved. And I would like to play one more game with him.”

Erik swallowed. No pressure. He sat at the table. The Professor held out his closed fists to him, a pawn in each hand. Erik tapped his left fist, and the Professor smiled and revealed black.

“Thank you, Erik,” he said, and Erik swallowed down his own first instinct, which was to say, _Thank_ you. One more game with the man he loved.

They played quietly for a time. The Professor began with a closed Sicilian Defense, which made Erik smile. “You never change, do you?” he said softly.

“It’s been said,” the Professor said with a small smile. “You know, in our later years, I never won a game against you without cheating.”

“I used to play against you in my head,” Erik confessed. “When I was…”

“I know,” the Professor said, and wasn’t that a novelty. He already knew everything. Everything that Erik could never tell Charles, but perhaps that resolve had been blunted by time.

Erik decided to probe further. “You know…”

“I know the truth about your years in captivity,” the Professor said, an infinite compassion in his eyes. “I know why you did what you did that day in Dallas, who you were trying to protect. I know why you shut me out. I know that you have suffered, and I know how you survived, in spite of yourself, in spite of your wish to simply die.” He reached out and took Erik’s hand, which was limp on the table. He rubbed at his knuckles gently. “I know how strong you’ve been, my love. I know how tired you are.”

He would _not_ break down again. He would _not._ He’d already lost it enough for one day. Erik shook his head, as if to shake off the pain the Professor’s words had conjured and forced down the lump in his throat. But there was something about the Professor, something about the warmth of him, that made him want to lay his head in his lap and let all of his problems drain out of him. Though he didn’t look like Charles, it was like he was the distilled essence of Charles—not the anger, not the pain, but what Charles had been to him for one glorious year, the comfort, the warmth, the inimitable sense of _home._ “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he confessed, his voice cracking, to his horror. “I don’t know why I couldn’t stop the Sentinels.”

“Ah, Erik,” the Professor sighed, and captured a bishop. “You shouldn’t blame yourself. We shouldn’t have thrown you to the wolves without knowing your limits first. There is a test I would like Blink to run—” Erik stiffened, and the Professor exhaled, a soft sound of sympathy. “I know. I know, that’s the last thing you want to hear. But she ought to look out the extent of the damage done to you, to your powers, by Trask and Stryker. I should have insisted sooner, but… I wanted you to myself a little bit longer.”

“Okay,” Erik said softly. He moved his king to squirm his way out of a check that the Professor would have had in two moves. “How… did it happen?”

The Professor’s hand faltered on his rook, and if it had been a deliberate strategy, Erik might have felt smug that he’d chosen exactly the right words to throw him off his game. Distracting each other had been part of chess as Charles and he had once played it, Erik once having projected detail of what he was planning for bed later that night in detail so lascivious and pornographic that Charles had hurled the board to the ground and tackled him right there in the study. He’d never quite achieved that level of distraction again, but the memory was enough to warm him, even now. But he was quickly learning that the only thing worse than causing Charles pain was causing the Professor pain. “You don’t have to answer,” he said quickly. “I just wanted to…”

“You have a right to know, if anyone does,” the Professor said slowly. “You died buying us time to move base after a surprise Sentinel attack. At the very least, you saved several lives. Including my own.”

When he learned of how he’d died, Erik simply nodded. It had been a good death; he didn’t mind it, he only wished he could’ve done a better job of it. He’d been prepared for death for most of his life. The only strange thing was that here he was, sitting in the aftermath, and still, peace eluded him. Still, he had things that had to be answered. “Will you be… all right?” he asked, feeling like the words fit clumsily around the breadth of the question.

The Professor took a shuddering breath. “I had learned to live without you once,” he said, not reprovingly, but still a firm reminder of the estrangement between Erik and Charles now. “I can do it again.”

Erik swallowed. Moved his queen. “Is Charles… you, I suppose, but… will _he_ be… all right?”

“See for yourself,” the Professor said, almost teasingly, as though he knew Erik wasn’t asking about the concussion or about the grief.

“I don’t know how any of this works,” Erik said. “If you’ve changed my present, have you changed your past? Will Charles… is it a guarantee, that he will grow up to be you?”

“Is it a guarantee that he will forgive you, you mean?” the Professor asked, and that was Charles all over, Charles who could pierce him through with a question, or a look, or a brush of his fingers. “We don’t know what will happen when you return to your own time. If your new future will overwrite what we’ve experienced here, or if this timeline will endure, and you will go on to live your own lives, separate from ours. But Charles… is lost, and angry, and it will pass, it will fade. And he will forgive you… eventually. Even if you don’t tell him the truth of where you’ve been.”

“How do you know?” Erik whispered.

“I did,” the Professor said simply, and moved his rook. “Check.”

Erik sacrificed his bishop almost without thought and said, urgently, “I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know the right words to say—what _he_ did to make you forgive _him_ —please, tell me what to say, what to do—”

The Professor grasped his hand with surprising strength, silencing him. “Do you know how I know that your future will already be better than my past?” he said lightly. Erik shook his head roughly. “Because I lived without my Erik for _twenty-seven years_ before he broke out of prison.” That, at last, made Erik take a shuddering breath. Twenty-seven years like the five he’d already endured—no. It was worse than Shaw, worse than the camps, beyond imagination or consideration. “Yes,” the Professor said, sympathetically, tenderly. “I know you can’t believe it now, but _I_ know that the two of you can endure anything and come out the stronger for it.” He reached inside the folds of his shirt, a slightly warmer-looking version of what Jean and Logan and the others wore, and drew out a ring on a chain, flashing variations of the dim light into Erik’s eyes. At once, he picked out platinum, steel, tin, nickel—all braided and twisted together into a man’s wedding band. He stared at it with huge, disbelieving eyes. “Both of you are damaged; both of you are broken. But I _know_ that when you’ve mended each other, you can mend the world. And I know that once you’ve mended your love, you can mend each other.” Through the sheen of tears in Erik’s eyes, he saw the Professor move his queen one last time. “We did. Checkmate.”

— ⓧ —

The world after concussion was definitely not as blurry as the world before concussion, but Charles still had a moment of deep confusion when he opened his eyes and saw Raven sitting next to his bed, fully blue. “I’ve told you this before, but maybe it’ll stick this time,” Raven said coolly. “That was very stupid.”

Charles scrubbed at his eyes and sat up. The world tilted a little, but not terribly; the worst thing was the way the fluorescent light seemed to be determined to bore holes into his head. “Running into an active battlefield? Getting concussed for my troubles? Yes, I’d figured that out myself.”

“All of that,” Raven said, “but not just that. For pushing down how much you care for him for so long that it explodes out of you in moments of pure idiocy.”

She didn’t have to specify _who_ Charles supposedly cared about. It was at the heart of the fundamental break between them, Charles had eventually figured out. That Erik had chosen him, not her, and that he hadn’t been able to do the same, hadn’t been able to accept Erik the cold-blooded murderer, Erik the monster he’d made himself into. Her heart belonged to Erik, and Erik’s heart belonged to Charles, and Charles’s heart belonged to… who? A chain of unrequited longing. All the times he’d wished he didn’t even have a heart, all the pains he’d taken to numb the agony of it. Charles’s heart was broken, a shattered thing not fit to give to anybody.

“Why are you here, Raven?” he asked, already exhausted by the fight he knew they were going to have. _If you haven’t forgiven me. If you still despise me._

He didn’t say any of that, but she heard it anyway; sometimes, in their childhood, after she’d asked him to stay out of her head, it seemed that she was the one who could read minds, with the way she always seemed to be able to tell what was on his. She stared at him now and said, abruptly, “You still can’t see it, can you. The sheer _hypocrisy_ of asking me to forgive you, when one strikeout and you cast us out of your lives.”

“You’re the one who left, Raven.”

“I couldn’t stay! You knew I couldn’t stay. You never liked what we were doing. If you’d had it your way, you’d have left all the mutants in all the facilities that Erik and I infiltrated, all the research labs I’ve taken down since then—you’d have let them all rot. Because you find it _distasteful,_ the work we did, up in your ivory tower, your Westchester mansion. With Erik gone, how could I stand up to you? How long until I slipped up and you left me to the wolves, too? I needed to remember that I couldn’t rely on you. So I left.”

Charles battled down a fierce anger, a fiercer sorrow. “I would have _never_ left you to the wolves.”

“I bet you told Erik that, too,” she said mockingly. “And you _still don’t see it_. The way you told us at the Pentagon, no killing… Years of wallowing in what your need for control has gotten you, and it’s still your way or the highway. Look around you, Charles. Is this the future you wanted?”

“You can’t tell me I’m a control freak and then try to pin the end of the world on me!” Charles shouted.

“Fine,” Raven said coolly. “Fair enough.” She stood then, her hand resting briefly on a thick file she’d put on the bedside table. Charles’s eyes wandered to it, as she knew they would.

“What’s that?” he asked in spite of himself.

“The answers you didn’t want to look for,” Raven said, and stalked out of the room. With hands that only shook a little, Charles lifted the file into his lap and opened it. It took his eyes a moment to focus, and when they did, he almost slammed the file shut and shoved it away. But a terrible, morbid curiosity enticed him to read on, took him by the hand and wouldn’t let him go.

_EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECT 125A-L: LEHNSHERR, ERIK (1963-1990)_

Underneath, a photo of Erik, the way he had looked the day he left for Dallas, but bruised and unconscious. A cruel line of blood—a bullet graze—curved its way across its temple. He looked pale and vulnerable, stripped out of his clothes, strapped down to a table that Charles could tell, even from the picture, was heavy plastic and not metal.

A row of gleaming glass surgical tools lay on a tray next to him.

And below that:

_Subject demonstrates wide & varied control over metal and magnetic materials. Experimental applications include metamorphic qualities of Project: Sentinel (see attached file). Subject was captured in Dallas after an attempt on his part to save the life of known mutant (designation C-12) Jacqueline Kennedy née Bouvier resulted in the death of current President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. See p. 12 for experimental regimen for first year in captivity, more to come pending survival tolerance of subject._

Charles stuffed a fist into his mouth to keep from crying out and turned the page.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	17. 1963-1968: Revelations

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1963.

His skull throbbed with pain. Wondering vaguely how he’d managed to injure himself this time, and how angry Charles would be with him, he reached for his head—

—and slammed into his wrist restraints. His eyes flew open and the world swam before him. No. This was a dream. This was another dream of the camps, any minute now he would see Shaw looming over him and it would be terrible but it would also be _over_ because Shaw was dead, because he and Charles had killed him, had ended his reign of terror forever.

But it _felt_ so real—

He reached for the restraints with his power but met—nothing. He turned his head, which made nausea swim up into his throat, but he had to know, he had to be sure… plastic. Heavy plastic wrapped around his wrists, and further down, his ankles. He was chained to a medical table. In his dreams he was usually a boy again, but now he was fully grown, and—and—

He reached wildly with the sixth sense he had for metal and came up with nothing— _nothing_ —how was that possible? The only answer was that he was now at the mercy of men again, men who knew what he could do, men who had taken it away from him. And without any metal, he was as powerless as a human. He was just as helpless as he had been as a boy, when the chains holding him captive had been too difficult to reach.

He’d thought he’d left vulnerability behind when he’d mastered his gift, but it turned out he’d just delayed it. He yanked at the plastic wrist cuffs hard enough to draw blood. It wouldn’t be the last time he rubbed himself raw trying to find a way out, any way out.

 _Charles,_ he thought in desolation, but heard nothing in return. He was out of range, then, and Charles wasn’t in Cerebro—

—or perhaps he’d blocked him out entirely—but Charles wouldn’t do that, he knew what their connection meant to Erik, he knew what it meant that Charles would always be able to find him, no matter where the humans took him, no matter what they did to him—

After an eternity of mute panic, he heard a door open, and craned his neck to see a very short man in a suit followed by a line of scientists in scrubs and lab coats enter, surveying him with open avarice. “Who are you?” he demanded, pulling harder at the restraints, like they were a particularly recalcitrant form of metal that he could move if he just _tried hard enough_. “What do you want with me?”

“Why,” the dwarf responded, his words precise and sterile as a scalpel, “to study you, Mr. Lehnsherr. Your mutation is… extraordinary. Perhaps the strongest I’ve seen yet in my years of studying _extraordinary_ people like you.”

Erik snarled and yanked again at the cuffs. So this was the man behind the laboratories he’d liberated, the one who had burned precise circles into Idie Okonkwo’s skin to see whether she could turn the heat to ice in time, the one who had drilled probes into little Quentin Quire’s brain to see whether telepathy was instantiated in physiology as well as genetics. But the doctors barely paid attention to him— _Again, Herr Doktor?_ —and the leader’s gaze slipped past his eyes, as though he weren’t even there, as though he were just a _thing_ to be dissected and pulled apart instead of a living, thinking being. “It looks as though the bullet merely grazed him,” one of the scientists at his head reported. “Probably left him with a concussion, but no lasting damage, certainly not to the part of his brain that controls his mutation.”

“Good,” the man in the suit murmured. “I would hate to see such a promising test subject come to nothing before we’ve even begun.”

“You won’t get away with this,” Erik grunted.

“With what?” the man asked mildly. “With imprisoning you? With experimenting on you? What makes you think anyone at all cares about what happens you? After all,” he said, unfurling a newspaper whose headline Erik could even see with his head strapped to the table, “you killed the President.”

KENNEDY SLAIN ON DALLAS STREET. 

A fresh wave of nausea rose up over him, threatened to drown him. He’d killed an innocent man with his powers in trying to save an innocent woman. All over again, it was Cuba all over again—

He’d never been any good with bullets.

“Major Stryker, if you’ll please prepare him for the intake tests.”

“You can take your tests and shove them up your—”

Without warning, one of them men in scrubs gagged him with a liquid-soaked rag. Erik tried to scream in rage, but the world was already fading around the edges—chloroform?—and the last thing he heard was the man’s cool, precise voice as he said, “Thank you, Major Stryker, but I would prefer to have him awake next time. Now, if you will start with the live vivisection—”

He faded to darkness, his dreams only not tossed with terrible visions because of the heavy blanket of chloroform that settled over him and smothered rational thought.

— ⓧ —

He woke with a glass scalpel slicing apart his belly and glass rib spreaders cracking open his bones, and he started to scream, and scream, and scream, and some part of him suspected that he might never stop.

— ⓧ —

1964.

Between the bone marrow aspirations and the core biopsies, he couldn’t count the days; they passed in a haze of vicious, sharp-fanged pain woven together randomly with interludes spent gasping into the bare, blood-splattered mattress in his cell. He couldn’t concentrate around the pain long enough to try the rather complicated trick of ripping someone’s blood out through their pores; in a way, the pain was the only thing that protected the men who were experimenting on him, but they were so skilled at causing it that they were surely safe. He couldn’t focus the way he had in the camps, couldn’t concentrate on a tiny pinprick of metal and lose himself in it, because there was no metal anywhere to be found—he felt blinded, he felt deafened, he felt, in his worst moments, that this must be what it was like for Charles after Cuba, learning to live without the use of his legs. The walls around him were blank glass and concrete, and the whole world felt dead to him. He’d never realized how much he’d relied on his ability to sense ambient metal in his surroundings until it was gone, ripped from him like the sample needles with his blood, his bone, his organ tissues.

What felt like months—years—in, he broke and reached out for Charles with all of his strength. And found—

nothing.

He was probably out of range, but… what if he wasn’t? Maybe they’d gotten to Charles, too. Maybe Erik had led them to the school with his careless rage, and Charles still survived but couldn’t forgive him.

He lay there like that for what might have been two days, his mind raw and open and pleading for Charles to return to him. Then the men came back with their glass scalpels and needles and he remembered, abruptly, that if Charles was in his mind, he would feel every cut, every bruise, every violation. And slowly, painfully, he reconstructed the walls that had kept Charles out before. One mental cinderblock at a time, until he sealed himself in, and was alone with his pain.

It was worth it, though. If he could keep Charles from ever feeling like this—it would have been worth it.

— ⓧ —

1965.

He got an opportunity to escape exactly once.

At first, his metal-sense was so deprived that he barely understood what he was feeling when it came back within range, a bright spark on the edge of his consciousness. For hours or maybe days he simply sank into that spark, pulling it around him like a shield, losing himself in the contours of that metal and letting the pain that wracked his physical body fade to almost nothing. He traced the outlines of it obsessively, lovingly—someone’s ID clip that they’d shoved into their pocket instead of leaving at the start of the no-metal zone. For the first time in a long time, he remembered who he was: not just a test subject, not just helpless little Erik reliving the camps all over again. He was Magneto, and with even the faintest hint of metal in his grasp, he was not powerless.

He lost himself in the meditative hum of metal around his mind, and when he felt ready, he reached out for the iron all around him, the iron that was too sparse to manipulate when he didn’t have a focus the way he did now. And he _pulled._

Half out of the restraints as the researchers had been transferring him to a gurney for further tests, he slowly sat up, feeling the creak of his abused ribs, the scream of scar tissue stretching, but distantly, artifacts of a body he’d transcended, and undid the ankle cuffs as well. An alarm was blaring in the background; presumably someone on security had seen all the men around him drop to the floor as blood sprayed everywhere, splattered him with red gore. He moved slowly, focusing on that metal clip, careful not to aggravate his injuries. It was moving away from him, but he’d locked onto it now—he could follow it out, follow it to freedom.

“Stop!” a man shouted at the edge of the corridor, pointing a plastic gun at him.

If the stakes were any lower, he would have been proud that he’d killed six scientists and four guards without any of the advantages to which he was accustomed before they finally managed to land a ceramic bullet into the meat of his shoulder and shocked him into unconsciousness—long enough for them to find the piece of metal he’d been hyperfocused on and carry it out of his range.

— ⓧ —

“Not bad, mutie,” Stryker said later, as he pulled out the electric cattle prod for his latest round at punishment. Erik only wished viciously that Stryker, who he’d come to loathe above all the researchers, even Trask, had been among the first wave of medical personnel killed. “But you failed, and you won’t get another chance.”

The worst part was the way Erik had started to believe him. Mutant trash, powerless, good for nothing except experimentation on how best to destroy his kind. The best thing he could expect in the near future was death.

— ⓧ —

1966.

At some point, he started begging for it—death.

— ⓧ —

1967.

At some point, he stopped begging for death and started begging for mercy. It was a defeat too painful to stomach, the way that they had at last broken him down into their creature, a cringing, defeated thing that lived not even for release but for the sweet promise of less pain.

At some point, he stopped begging at all.

— ⓧ —

1968.

When Charles came for him, he at first was overwhelmed with mingled horror and bone-deep relief that his shields must have failed at some point over the last—five years, apparently—was it really so little time? Or so much? His sense of chronology was all skewed—and Charles must have sensed what he was feeling and launched a rescue mission.

When it became clear that Charles had no idea of either why he’d been captured or what had happened to him in the years since, the bitterness of that realization shocked him. It was what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? For Charles to remain sheltered from the cold truth of reality, even if it meant his suffering. But Charles’s disgust for him, his open desire to leave Erik in that cell and let him rot—it was not quite the worst pain he’d experienced in the last five years, but that said more about the intensity of the pain he’d undergone than his lack of feeling for Charles.

As they stepped into the future, Erik couldn’t help but think that the idea that _he_ had any future at all was ridiculous. Charles had torn that hope from him, that last lingering hope he hadn’t even realized he’d been clinging onto: the memory of Charles’s mind pressed to his, the idea that one day he would feel it again, just once.

The future seemed very bleak indeed.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	18. 2023: What Remains

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

The moment he started reading, he wanted to stop, but he forced himself to continue, though the nausea built, though the pain in his eyes that he realized were tears wanting to come out in spite of a concussion began to spike at him irritably. His fingers shook as he turned the pages, a compendium of twenty-seven years of torture that this timeline’s Erik Lehnsherr had endured… including the five years of medical experimentation that his own Erik had suffered through, while he was busy drowning himself in scotch and Hank’s serum, wrapping himself in cotton wool and insulating himself from Erik’s cries for help, if they’d ever come.

The meticulous torment that they’d put him through in order to create the Sentinels—the dispassionate way they reported that they’d kept him alive after they’d gone too far, taken too much blood or cut into him a few too many times—it made his head swim, his heart throb like the place in his chest where it should be had caved in on itself. The photographs of Erik’s organs, exposed and vulnerable, the images of his face twisted in agony as he screamed, terribly, horribly awake—no. No. He’d never wanted this for him. He’d never wanted this for _anyone_ , but least of all for Erik, who had already suffered so much. He’d agreed to this insane trip through time to protect the future of mutants and humans alike, but he acknowledged now that he’d wanted the secret of how to save Erik, of how to save their love that Xavier and his counterpart had seemingly mastered. Even when he’d hated him, even when he’d been sure he was a monster, there had been no one he’d wanted to save more than Erik.

He read through all twenty-seven years covered by the file, although his own Erik was out now, although the last twenty-two years of it would happen over Charles Xavier’s _dead fucking body_ (twice over, he suspected, given the way Xavier had treated Erik with such tenderness and compassion). He read about the gene harvesting, about the nano-Sentinels; and the sheer cruelty of robbing Erik— _Erik_ , who, even though Charles had coined the phrase, embodied the words "mutant and proud" like no one else alive—of his powers, it was almost too much to be borne.

When he finished, he threw up, thinking of Jean and hangovers and the things he owed the people he loved. Then he set out to find Erik, head swimming and not caring in the slightest that Blink was snarling after him.

— ⓧ —

He found him in the infirmary after having done what felt like two full circuits around the base, because of course he did. Erik was lying on his side, knees curled to his chest and teeth gritted, as Blink drew what looked like a vial of spinal fluid. A privacy curtain fluttered between him and the rest of the room. “Do not move,” she told him sternly. “I will run for nano-Sentinels.”

Erik nodded, then winced, and rolled onto his back. And for the first time, Charles could see the new scars that pocked his body. The heavy bands of scarring, still raw, where he’d been restrained by wrists and ankles; the Y-shaped incision on his chest that made him look like a corpse; the surgical scars, _so many_ of them, over and through the ones that Shaw had left on Erik’s skin earlier, but still red, some of them even still weeping, instead of long-faded over white lines, more a memory of pain than anything else. Charles must have gasped, because Erik turned to him sharply and his face went white as he saw what Charles was seeing; he threw a sheet over himself, but it was too late. They stared at each other, fully aware that the last secrets between them were being stripped bare in that instant.

Charles approached hesitantly; Erik watched him warily, like a wounded animal who had learned not to trust even beloved friends. Charles wanted nothing more than to take his hand, but Erik’s were clenched into fists. And now Charles wanted to coax them open, to soothe them into the gentleness he knew those hands were capable of, and if that wasn’t a metaphor for their entire relationship—

“Did you kill the President,” Charles asked softly, like he should have years ago, though he already knew the answer.

Erik swallowed, gritted his teeth. “Yes.”

Charles shook his head, exasperated. “Erik, for God’s sake—Raven gave me the Trask Industries file on you, god knows who she got it from, but I know you didn’t do it—”

“I killed him,” Erik said sharply. “I didn’t mean to, but I still did it. If I hadn’t meddled, he would still be alive. If you asked me if I paralyzed you, I would say yes, too.”

Charles swallowed. “Fine. Fine. But why… why did you never…” _reach out to me, explain yourself,_ but that wasn’t right, that wasn’t fair. He softened the accusation in his voice. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he tried, not that it was much better. Again: “Why did you let me believe…”

“I didn’t want you to feel my pain,” Erik said roughly.

“Feel your pain?! Is that why—why you blocked me out? Erik, I thought you’d left me! I thought—” He cut himself off and closed his eyes. “You’ve been doing this for years,” he said dully. “Blocking me out. So I wouldn’t ‘feel your pain.’ Your nightmares…”

“I loved you,” Erik said, “I would never have subjected you to that.”

 _Loved._ Charles took a shuddering breath. Fine. That was fine. He didn’t want forgiveness, just _answers_. “You don’t get to make those choices for me, Erik! I wanted to help you—I wanted to soothe your nightmares away—I wanted to _know_ , I want to _have known_ , to not have made the mistake of leaving you there, I wanted not to be robbed of the last five years with you!”

“I wanted you _safe,”_ Erik snarled. “I wanted you and the school to be far away from this—and you wanted it too—you never asked, did you? You never even looked. You were content to let me lock away the memory of these missions because you wanted to pretend that we didn’t need to do them—I don’t regret what I did—” but his voice cracked, and Charles knew he was lying.

“Erik, Erik,” he said, anguished, and reached for him, but Erik flinched away and he stopped. 

“We have to stop this,” Charles said desperately. He regretted it, the way they had talked around their issues. The way they had stepped around the issue of Raven, and so when Raven had left it had been one more thing curdling in Charles’s heart, one more thing to blame Erik for, a mistake he might not have made had they been on solid footing before he’d left for Dallas. “Making assumptions about each other. About what I can handle, about the kind of man you are—were— _are_ —it’s caused us nothing but pain. Erik, please, let me in.”

“You won’t like what you find there,” Erik warned.

“Impossible,” Charles said softly, and wished more than he had ever had before that he had his powers back, that he could press into the bright, twisting gears of Erik’s minds and lose himself, bathe in its light and heal himself. He pressed his forehead to Erik’s, who didn’t flinch away this time, as if he could press himself into Erik’s mind if he just tried hard enough— “I can’t—damn it, I can’t hear you—”

“Your powers—” Erik said roughly.

“I couldn’t,” he said. “I took Hank’s serum not to walk again, but to sleep again, and now I can’t sleep without it—the school is gone, Erik. I couldn’t do it without you. My powers—I couldn’t bear it without you—Raven couldn’t bear it without you—I’ve lost everything I’ve ever loved because I lost the one man I ever loved.”

“Maybe you should have fought harder for them,” Erik grated out. _Fought harder for me,_ he didn’t say, but Charles still heard.

“Maybe you should’ve, too,” he said, wrecked. And Erik nodded, slowly, like forgiveness slipping over his hands, and Charles sobbed, and when he opened his eyes he could see tears glittering in Erik’s, slipping down his cheeks like water turned to mercury. Charles climbed on the bed next to him, careful not to jar his injuries, at once grateful and resentful of the serum, that it would give him this, his ability to curl around Erik and comfort him, and rob him of his ability to seek comfort in the nooks and crannies of Erik’s elegant, luminous mind. He wrapped his arms around Erik and attempted to beam the feeling churning inside of him into Erik’s mind; not with telepathy, just with the knowledge two people might have of each other’s hearts.

“You must think me such a fool,” Charles whispered. “Here, in this time… seeing what we have seen… knowing what I refused to know for all these years.” Erik shook his head, but didn’t speak, and that wasn’t right, he needed his voice, the smooth vowels and sharp consonants, he needed the way Erik spoke like every word was a battle. “Can we start over? Please. Please, let us start over.”

Erik turned his head to look at Charles and nodded, slowly, and Charles smiled, tremulous and tiny. He said, his voice lurching along but gathering steam, like a newly-fixed wheel on a rutted road, “My name’s Charles Xavier. I’m a telepath, and a junkie, and a bit of a dick.”

“Erik. Lehnsherr,” Erik said, shy and sweet, not sure where Charles was going but willing to play along, and Charles loved him, loved him, loved him. “I… try too hard to protect the people I love. From the world. From themselves. I should listen more, I should… ask for help more. I know these things.”

“Hello, Erik,” Charles said haltingly. And then, “Has anyone ever told you that… you have a very groovy mutation?”

Erik stared at him. And then, stutteringly, wonderfully, he started to laugh. Charles fell headfirst into that laugh, that beautiful, utterly abandoned laugh, and it was almost like being in Erik’s mind, the world fading around him until nothing but that laugh existed, nothing but that laugh mattered at all.

— ⓧ —

“Okay,” Stryker said, “move in.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	19. 2023: Of Last Resort

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

Erik sensed it first.

They had one lovely moment in which they were separate from the rest of the universe, during which everything fell away but each other, but the soft press of Charles’s index finger on Erik’s thumb, the way he ran his nose over Erik’s prison-regulation short haircut every so often, the way Erik snuffled into Charles’s collarbone. “I love you, love you, love you,” Charles whispered, as if to make up for the way they had never said it to each other after the beach, and Erik said nothing at all but sighed into his skin as if overcome, as if whatever he was feeling went beyond words and into happiness so pure it came back around again to desolation.

Charles wasn’t sure how much time passed like that before Erik sat bolt upright, and winced as his head protested the sudden drop in cerebrospinal fluid from the spinal tap Blink had run. “Charles,” he said sharply, and for the first time in a long time, Charles allowed himself to relish the way Erik said his name, the sharp consonants and near-drawl of the _a_ , before he registered the urgency in his voice.

He sat up, too. “What is it?” he said.

“I think…” he tilted his head, winced again, but powered on, “I think we have Sentinels inbound.”

Charles’s breath caught. He was sure he would have nightmares about his encounter with Sentinels in the forest for years; how the human race had ever imagined that creatures this monstrous would be protective and not _pure evil_ was beyond him. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Erik said tightly. “I… I may not be good for much right now, but I am confident in my ability to sense trouble incoming. You have to find someone, you have to tell them—”

But Charles hesitated, unwilling to leave Erik when he’d just found the two of them again, especially if they were going to be in mortal danger in a matter of moments. But when Erik tried to move, he groaned and dropped his head in his hands again, still wiped out from the procedure. “Okay,” Charles said quickly. “Okay, okay. I’ll be back, all right? Don’t move, I’ll be right back.”

He sprinted out into the hallway, head turning rapidly from side to side as he searched for Logan, Blink, Jean, Psylocke— _anyone—_ but the base, already sprawling in nature, seemed to have multiplied in size. “Hello?” he shouted, but his voice echoed back to him and he tsked with impatience, shoving open doors almost at random, sprinting down the hallway to the cafeteria, to Xavier’s study—empty, empty—and at last, almost a full wing down from the infirmary, he pushed open the door to the dark, low-ceilinged space where they’d been spat out into 2023 and found every adult mutant and a handful of the children clustered around Xavier’s wheelchair and a table where a holographic projection of a globe revolved slowly, lights blinking in patterns that looked nothing like the population maps Charles was familiar with in his own time. A war council, deciding what to do now that Erik had struggled with the Sentinels, no doubt. Raven and Alex were there, standing near the back, but Charles had no time to think about that now.

“Sentinels,” he gasped. “Erik said he sensed Sentinels coming toward us.”

The room exploded into sound. Xavier’s chin tilted up. “Are you certain,” he asked, his voice low but somehow managing to carry through the panicked whispers and cries for everyone to shut up.

“It’s Erik,” Charles said, and that seemed to be enough for Xavier to both divine his meaning that Erik was all certainty and no doubt, ever, and that they had made up, because a tiny crease appeared around his eyes that Charles took to be approval.

“Evacuation protocol,” Xavier said, and everyone sprang into action, with Blink—wow, Charles thought, a thrill of scientific interest running through him, was that a form of teleportation?—back to the infirmary, and Psylocke and Old Hank hustling the rest of the mutants further back into the workshop, where a rusty old Blackbird listed to one side. “It’ll hold long enough to get them away,” Xavier said in response to Raven’s unspoken question. “Everyone else—battle stations.”

“What do they want?” Alex said tightly.

“To wipe us all out, o’course,” Logan ground out, his claws already out and glinting in the low light. “Must have followed us from when we picked up the others.”

“Impossible, Magneto destroyed the carrier—” Jean said.

“Logan is right,” Xavier said, his voice tight. “If they found out where we were hiding, they would need no other reason to stage an attack. But the timing… it is suspicious. All of you,” he said to Raven and Alex and Charles, “you must join the others in the evacuation. Blink will ensure the injured get to the Blackbird—”

“No way—” Raven protested.

“We can fight, like we did before,” Alex added. Something had changed him about the future, hardened him—Alex had always been afraid of himself, afraid enough to supersede his natural protective instinct. Charles had always known that he’d stayed with him out of personal loyalty, but also because he feared what he might do as part of Magneto’s commandos, who he might hurt—the wounds from Darwin’s death ran deep. The future had somehow cracked open that shell and released the fighter Charles had seen within the first time he’d used Cerebro to glance into his mind, the thing that had convinced him to recruit Alex for their little team to take down Shaw.

“They must _know_ about you,” Xavier said. “I don’t know how, but they must know that our past is precarious at the moment—and if they kill even one of you, who can say what might happen to the timeline? I should never have allowed you to fight in the forest—I’ve put you all at risk, I’m so sorry.”

“Charles, that’s bullshit,” Raven said, but before she could continue, a massive _boom_ shook the base. Charles cocked his head. That sounded like it was coming from—

“The infirmary,” Xavier realized, his voice creaky with pained helplessness, and Charles’s mind went utterly, terribly blank.

When he came to, he was already sprinting back down the hallways, Jean beside him, and Logan already far ahead. He turned to the side and saw Raven and Alex pounding down the halls beside him; Raven he understood, Alex he took a moment to longer to ponder before he remembered that his grown younger brother, Scott, was also in the infirmary after having been injured. Logan bounded out of sight as Jean panted, “They must know about Magneto. It has to be TRASK, here to stop us before we can use him to shut down the Sentinels.”

“TRASK?” Charles gasped for breath.

“TRASK, in our time Trask Industries, manufactured the Sentinels and maintains the human prison camps and strongholds,” Raven said beside him, her breath easy though she was matching their pace. When Charles shot her an incredulous look at her sudden depth of knowledge, she shrugged easily and said, “You can learn a lot when you talk to people instead of wallowing in your own personal problems, Charles.”

“So,” Charles said dully, “they’re here to kill him.”

No one answered him. He put his head down and ran, ran, _ran._

— ⓧ —

A Sentinel carrier was _right on top of them._

Erik stared at the ceiling as though he could bore through it with his gaze and catch a glimpse of the carrier surely hovering just above the ground, which was probably the only reason he survived when the ceiling caved in.

He threw himself to the side, ignoring the throbbing agony in his head, but didn’t quite manage to clear the blast zone in time; he threw his arms over his head as a chunk of concrete rushed right at him—

It exploded in a blast of red. A small hand grasped his shoulder and yanked him out of the debris, and he turned to Blink supporting a mutant with a bandaged right eye as he replaced his red sunglasses, covering the beam he’d shot out of his left eye to destroy the hunk of secret base that would have likely crushed Erik. “Get down!” he shouted and blasted away smaller rocks still coming down like large hailstones. His aim was a little off—from the injury, Erik surmised—but there was still an expertise and fluidity to his movements that allowed them to emerge only slightly scratched and extremely dusty.

“Thanks,” Erik said, trying to keep his head from splitting apart with the pain. “Who…?”

“Scott,” the man said. “Alex’s brother,” he added when Erik continued to look at him blankly.

“Alex has a brother?” Erik said, bewildered. And then, “Have you… been here the entire time?”

“I definitely was not listening to you and the Professor un-break up,” Scott blurted out, and oh, now he could see the resemblance to Alex.

Before Erik could respond, Logan burst in through the slightly caved-in door. He bounded over the rubble until he got to where Erik and Scott were crouched. “Logan!” Scott exclaimed. “What’s going on?”

“They must be after you,” Logan said to Erik. His back straightened. “Must’ve caught sight of you in the battle in the forest, figured out our plan. Clarie,” he said to Blink, “you gotta get them out of here—”

“It’s too late for that, I’m afraid,” a new voice drawled from the hole in the ceiling, and Sentinels began to drop out of the air.

Logan, Scott, and Blink lunged into action. Logan slashed at the Sentinels, opening up wounds that closed over and hardened into what Erik could feel was adamantium. Blink moved nimbly, opening up a violet-edged portal to send a Sentinel spike into the heart of another. Scott seemed to be faltering, rubbing at his forehead every time he took off his sunglasses to use his eye-beams. And Erik—stood there, frozen, feeling like a child being asked to move a coin again, struggling to call up a power that seemed to writhe, unruly, in the back of his head. He raised trembling hands and tried to tap that wellspring always bubbling beneath his consciousness, the anger and pain, but the metallic skin of the Sentinels seemed to stutter and flex under his mental touch.

And they were _fast._ One drove a spike into the ground passing so close to Blink’s head it sheared off a lock of her hair. The X-Men moved like some natural force of destruction, combining their strengths as if on muscle memory—as he watched Blink opened a portal for Scott to shoot a beam into the back of a Sentinel’s head, toppling it forward.

But there were three of them—three functional warriors—and a dozen or more Sentinels. Sentinels didn’t tire. Sentinels didn’t die. They were hilariously outclassed… but for Erik.

Erik grappled with their sleek, predatory shapes, trying to wrest them into something approaching order, but he was too scattered, too out-of-practice, too unfocused, too broken. And _not fast enough._

In a swift, calculated movement a Sentinel reached through one of Blink’s portals, grasped her arm, and tossed her back through the portal into Scott. They both went down with a grunt that turned into a terrible crack of bone and Blink’s scream. She fell—the violet portals she’d opened in the air smeared shut—Scott staggered, stunned—

“Slim!” Logan cried right next to Erik’s ear, and then shouted again as a Sentinel spike impaled him through the shoulder—

A Sentinel thing-that-passed-for-a-fist swung and struck Scott hard enough in the head that he crumpled immediately. Panic pounded high in Erik’s throat—he’d already had a head injury—he fought to concentrate and not wonder if, oh god, if they were dead, if they’d died trying to protect him. And he felt it. The familiar surge of anger and pain, and he threw out his hands and the Sentinels—

—stopped, but not entirely—they were still moving slowly, like quicksand, inexorably advancing toward him as he strained to grind them to a halt. They were stronger than his mutation _._ A deep jolt of fear unlike anything he’d felt since he’d realized that, trapped in a metal-free zone, he was powerless, thundered through him.

 _“Very_ impressive,” the voice drawled, and Erik couldn’t glance up, but the man who’d spoken was advancing downward anyway, the Sentinel carrier having lowered a set of steps for him. It was an elderly man with a beard that obscured his features, but there was something familiar about him. That drawl. The twang of his consonants, the way he looked at Erik with a speculative gleam in his eye. “I can see why they hoped you’d be their salvation.”

“Stryker,” Logan grunted, and Erik’s blood chilled in his veins.

Stryker.

The cruelest of the men who had cut into Erik, tortured him for years; the worst of them all, the one who had taken genuine pleasure in his suffering, and not just because he was a sadist, but because Erik had been a _mutant_ , something less than human, less than animal, even. Erik felt a burst of incandescent rage that this man, this _creature_ had survived the end of the world when almost every mutant had perished, and the Sentinels stuttered to a full stop before they began progressing toward him again, a moment when his power had briefly surged strongly enough to paralyze them. He ought to be good at that—paralysis. _Fuck,_ Stryker was already inside his head, and he’d barely spoken.

“Come on, Magneto,” Stryker said. “Give up. You’re not strong enough to do what they need you to do—we made sure of that, even without nano-Sentinels. All the king’s horses and men and whatnot.” He stepped neatly onto the rubble-dusted floor. He was wearing fatigues, the way Erik remembered him, though his memory of Stryker spitting in his immobilized face and muttering, “Mutie _scum_ ,” was sharper. This man—measured, amused, genial—was nothing like he remembered of the man, except for his cold, piercing eyes.

And at that moment, in clatter of feet and gasping breath, Charles, Jean, Alex, and Raven shoved their way into the infirmary. They paused, seeing the Sentinels moving slowly, as though through quicksand or molasses, but Erik’s surprise broke his concentration for a beat, and as one the Sentinels swiveled towards the newcomers, their spiked fists raised, and it was all Erik could do to grit his teeth and slow them again.

“Erik!” Charles cried out, and Erik closed his eyes, despair settling over him. His greatest weakness, on display, and sure enough, when he looked back, Stryker was leveling a plastic gun at Charles, a manic grin spreading across his face.

“Oh, we know the truth, _Magneto_ ,” he said, in response to Erik’s cry of dismay. “We know what you died for. _Who_ you died for. Come with me, or I’ll kill him.”

“Erik, no—” Charles shouted, and Stryker fired.

The shot went deliberately wide, shattering the tile next to Charles’s head; he cried out and threw his arms up, too late, Stryker’s point was made, if he’d wanted to have blown Charles’s brains out he could’ve. “No!” Erik shouted. “No. Stop. Stop, please.”

Stryker looked impressed. “Twenty-seven years of experimentation and you never gave it up so easily. There’s something to this, I have to say. Maybe we should’ve taken the telepath, too, made you more cooperative—”

 _“Fuck you,”_ Erik snarled, and poured all of his energy into the Sentinel closest to Stryker. Haltingly, it turned, raised its head, prepared a beam to sear out Stryker’s heart—but the lapse in concentration cost him, and every other Sentinel began to move faster, one stepping in between Stryker and the Sentinel fully under Erik’s control, the others closing in on Erik and where the others were clustered against the wall. “Stop,” he finally gasped, and they slowed again; the helm of the one he’d been puppeteering went dim. He gasped for breath, black spots bursting at the edges of his vision, and hung his head in defeat.

“Like I said,” Stryker said, “not strong enough. Come on, Magneto. Give these fools up for lost, and we’ll take you home. Back to the time you belong.”

“Why would you do that?” Erik said suspiciously.

Logan began to laugh, a rasping, wet sound from the Sentinel spike still impaled in his lung. “You don’t have it, do you?”

“Have what?” Stryker asked coldly.

“ _Whatever you need!_ Whatever it is you took from him to create the Sentinels—you hadn’t gotten it yet when Jean arrived and busted him out! She made it back in time after all. You have to send him back, because if you don’t, the Sentinels will never exist. We’ll have _won._ ”

Stryker’s lip curled. “I always told the boys to be wary of you, that you weren’t as dumb as you looked,” he said. “Fine. The bulk of the Sentinel research took place after 1968, true. But it doesn’t matter, Wolverine. We’ll take him, one way or another. We’ll send him back. And the Sentinels will live.”

Erik looked up and saw the bleak truth of it. The Sentinels were closing in on him and Logan now, their arms outstretched as if to embrace him, or to strangle him. Stryker still had his gun aimed at Charles, and the others were hemmed in by their own wave of Sentinels. They would take him, one way or another, and then use him as a weapon… to destroy his people. 

Quietly, so that only Logan, feet away from him, could hear him, Erik said softly, “My older self must have told you what to do if you failed in your task, right?”

Logan turned his head to look at him and nodded, slowly. He beckoned with his head. Erik stepped closer—

—and Logan sank his claws deep into his chest.

“ _No!”_ he heard Charles scream, before his vision trickled away into blackness.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	20. 2022: Numbers, or Death

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2022.

In spite of the nightmares that not even the mental scaffolding Charles had erected in Erik’s mind could take away, Erik is still a tactical genius and outrageously charismatic. If Charles is the figurehead of the ever-diminishing mutant movement, Erik is his right and his left hand, Erik who held him when Raven died, Erik who is a teacher and a mentor in the time of Sentinels, Erik who fiddles with the ring Charles had scavenged for him even though he can’t use his powers to fidget with it the way he once might have. 

Which is why, on the worst day of Charles Xavier’s twenty-first century, the moment Warpath gives them the news, he and Erik split in opposite directions, Erik to Forge and Hank’s workshop, where their last and best hope is coming together in fits and starts, and Charles to round up the rest of the mutants in the next twenty minutes for evacuation. For efficiency’s sake, the helicopter, with its cargo attachment that the time machine fits inside—just barely, and he has no idea what they’ll do when Forge puts on the outer casement—and the Blackbird are parked on opposite ends of the camp they’ve set up in the ruins of an old stadium in what used to be Maine. 

Charles casts his mind out and settles it in a sparkling net over all the mutants in his care. There are so few of them left, it doesn’t even tax his abilities. _Evacuation_ , he broadcasts. _Get to the Blackbird._ And they drop their things and run to their assigned stations. Blink ports their medical stores into the back of the Blackbird and is helping Jubilee stand on her broken ankle, carrying one of the children who is down with a bad cold on her back. Kitty has raced to the Blackbird and is prepared to hold the whole thing intangible if the Sentinels come faster than they can prepare to escape them. Logan and Scott have cornered the rest of the children and are loading them onto the Blackbird. The only mutants missing are Forge, Jean, and Erik.

The co-pilot’s seat of the Blackbird has been ripped out for him. He wheels on, and nods at Hank, who is tapping a claw anxiously against the instrument panel. Ever since they started this madcap endeavor, Hank has been particularly anxious during evacuations. Charles can technically fly the Blackbird in an emergency, but Hank is better at it, which takes him away from where he’d really like to be: at the workshop, ensuring the delicate machinery of the time machine doesn’t tangle or short out during transit. 

Within eighteen minutes, they’re loaded on and ready to evacuate. Charles looks behind him at the sea of black jumpsuits and feels a surge of powerful fondness. His people, resilient and unbroken, still surviving. Still surviving.

Then the helicopter crackles onto the secure comms channels. And it’s not Erik, who has the equivalent of Charles’s role coordinating with the other craft. It’s Forge.

“We have a problem,” he says, the tension in his voice clear even though he’s not visible.

“What?” Hank says urgently.

“The couplings have come undone. We need to rewire them and check the particle distributor for damage, none of which we can do here, but we can’t risk loading up the console and the conch without at least stabilizing the alpha and epsilon pairings.”

Hank looks as though he’s about to vibrate out of the pilot’s seat. “I’ll—” be right there, Charles knows he wants to say, but he glances behind him at the fifty-two mutants milling about the Blackbird and his expression crumples. He takes a deep breath and bravely returns to the comms. “Do what you can. Worst comes to worst, we can do a second build.”

“That’ll put us back by _years_ ,” Forge says, dismayed.

“Do what you can,” Hank repeats.

Before Forge signs off, Charles leans forward. “Forge,” he says urgently. “Where are Jean and Erik?”

“They’re trying to help stabilize the machine,” Forge reports, and clicks off.

Charles turns to Hank for an explanation. Hank looks like he wants to rip his fur out. “It happens all the time,” he tells Charles. “The couplings are delicate. Jean knows what to do. It’s just that we’re in the middle of evacuating from a Sentinel attack, that’s all.”

“How bad is it,” Charles says, and Hank cuts the bullshit.

“The problem is that we need to do immediate repairs to prevent further damage, and we absolutely cannot transport it until those repairs are done,” Hank says, a note of panic entering his voice. Hank has mellowed into someone composed and genial, even at the end of the world, but now in him Charles sees the young man who was so excited about finding a way to minimize his mutation, a young man who panicked and made mistakes and held grudges and is, above all else, _afraid._ “They’ll do what they can, but they’ll be cutting it awfully fine. I worry they won’t make it out in time before the Sentinels come.”

“If you were there, would it speed things along?” Charles says urgently. “I can fly the Blackbird—”

“Not when Sentinels are in hot pursuit, you can’t,” Hank says, not unkindly. “And no. Forge knows the ins and outs as well as I do. It’s not a question of more hands, it’s an issue of minimum time frame.” He takes a deep breath, like he knows how Charles will react to what he’s about to say. “Jean and Erik—they know the risks.”

“Tell them to leave it,” Charles demands.

Hank meets his eyes. “No.” And Charles knows the calculation as well as Hank does, he knows that the machine is worth any risk, worth any of their lives individually, but—he can’t lose them. He won’t lose them. He won’t lose _him._ Not again. Not again.

He turns over his shoulder and shouts, “Blink! Get me to the workshop.”

“Charles, _no—”_ Hank says frantically, but the mutants are well-trained to listen to him and Erik alone, and without question, Blink opens a portal for him. Hank clutches for his arm, and Charles turns and glares at him— _Don’t make me make you_ —and Hank bares his teeth, and Charles takes control of him and forces him to let go. Desperate times, and things he would never do if it weren’t the end of the world, the end of _his_ world. He goes through the portal and in the new, fresh air he’s breathing, he can sense the metallic taste of Sentinels inbound. The portal shimmers out of existence behind him, closing around Hank’s shouts, and he forces himself onward, where a flapping tarp marks the start of the workshop, where the low, frantic murmur of Jean’s voice and the sizzling spark of electronics gone horribly wrong alert him that he’s made it to the right place.

 _Erik,_ he calls out for the first time, and Erik’s mind is—too tranquil, too steady. A perfect tableau of serenity.

 _Charles,_ Erik sighs, _why am I not surprised._

_You need to leave it. You need to take Jean and Forge and leave, right now. The Sentinels—_

_I know. I can feel them. Isn’t it strange, that they took away my ability to do anything about them, but they left my ability to sense them, to feel our impending doom? Or perhaps not strange, merely sadistic._

_Erik,_ Charles thought, _you’re frightening me._

_I’m sorry, my love. The world for one man? It’s a matter of numbers._

“No!” Jean shouts as Charles turns the corner and sees the machine, half-loaded onto the storage container. “I’m not leaving you!”

And Charles—understands, with a horrible rush of clarity. Erik’s planning to stay. They’ve cut it too close, they’ll never get away with the machine before the Sentinels catch up to them—the helicopter is far slower and clunkier than the Blackbird, though it’s also less likely to register on radar—unless someone stays behind to hold off the Sentinels while the others get away with the machine. He throws it all at Erik, tries to shake that firm resolve, tries to impress upon him how _unacceptable_ this outcome is. _No,_ he thinks frantically. _No, you_ can’t, _you’ll_ die _._

“Dying so that our people can live?” Erik says aloud. Jean turns, for the first time sensing Charles behind them—a sign of her distraction—and sends a pleading look to him. As if he’s ever been able to make Erik do anything, telepathy or no telepathy. “This is easy.”

Charles desperately seeks an opening—but Erik’s walls are strong, stronger than Hank’s, and Charles has never been able to get him to do _anything_. Gently, Erik pushes Jean toward the helicopter. “No, no,” she says frantically, and Charles empathizes.

“Jean,” Erik says firmly, “in hard times, we all have to do hard things,” and Jean—deflates. _No,_ Charles wants to say; he doesn’t know what’s passed between them but Jean’s slumped shoulders and resigned, already-grieving expression frightens him. “Get him out of here,” Erik tells her, and Charles shouts in protest as Jean begins to levitate his wheelchair.

He leans forward, yells, “Don’t do this! Erik! _Erik!”_ Lashes out with his mind, panic running through his blood too quickly to let the grief in, skitters off of Erik’s walls, still impenetrable as titanium, still strong as his iron will. Jean wraps her arms around him as they rise up, up, and casting his mind out, he can feel the hot shimmer of tears on her cheeks, her hair whipping around and stinging their faces, but he shoves it all aside and concentrates on the single point of light in the darkness of a life circumscribed by Sentinels: Erik, his tiny wry smile, the glint of gold on his ring finger as he continues loading the machine into the storage container.

 _Don’t fuss, Charles,_ Erik tells him, and Charles seizes on it, even as he struggles in Jean’s arms as she hauls him into the helicopter, even as he pours his horror, his frozen denial, into the channel of Erik’s mind that he’s opened to him.

 _Don’t do this, Erik,_ he pleads. He feels like a child on a beach, like a young man watching everything he’s ever loved slip away from him. _Erik, please. I love you. Please. Please._

 _I love you,_ Erik sighs like spring coming at last. _You've saved me twice, Charles Xavier. You gave me a home, and, much later, you gave me a purpose again. Now let me save you._

And then Erik shoves him out of his mind with such violence that Charles reels backwards, mind aching as though he’d walked into an invisible wall, and Charles _screams_ at the loss, again, of the mind that for the last decade has made the vagaries of his own mutation bearable, screams as the world comes rushing in, horrible and fresh, as suddenly Jean’s tattered telepathy beside him and Forge’s shaking hands on the helicopter controls and Hank and the others in the blackbird and, far away but coming closer every moment, the humans on their Sentinel carrier all sharpen painfully enough to cut into the delicate flesh of his mind. He screams and pounds on the walls, tries to press himself to the mind he can sense right on the other side of those walls, but Erik keeps him out, and keeps him out, and keeps him out—

—quickly enough, he’s out of sight—

—but Forge could never be fast enough to maneuver them out of Charles’s range before Erik’s mind falls terribly, crushingly, _permanently_ silent.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	21. 2023: The Hard Fight Ahead

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

Only Raven held Charles back from sprinting across a debris- and Sentinel-strewn field to Erik, and from the look on his face Jean suspected that only his current lack of telepathic power kept him from crumpling Logan’s mind where he stood, even if he would later regret it. Erik didn’t—couldn’t—look at them—he tried to gasp, but couldn’t draw breath—Logan withdrew his claws and he crumpled. Charles screamed and wrenched out of Raven’s grip, and she had to join forces with Alex to drag him backwards. “Erik! _Erik!”_ he called, obviously desperately willing him to wake up, sounding as though if he had his powers he would break every vow he’d ever sworn and invade Erik’s mind just to get him to _wake up_ , to stand up, to look at him.

The Sentinels quickened.

“You fool,” Stryker snarled, and gestured; a Sentinel beam struck Logan right in the temple and he, too, was down, possibly—oh god, Jean thought—dead. Stryker strode over to where Erik and Logan were sprawled and signaled again, and the Sentinels began to move, surrounding them in a circle—Jean went after them, but Stryker fired again in her direction, and she stopped the bullet but by the time she refocused it was too late, the Sentinels had begun glowing as they prepared to beam back up to the mothership.

“No!” she shouted, and reached out a hand to try to anchor Erik and Logan to this plane, even knowing that her telekinesis would bounce right off the Sentinels’ what-passed-for-skin, but she was too late, too late—in an instant, they were gone, and all that was left on the floor was a smear of blood and charred marks where the Sentinels’ laser had struck.

“Where did they go? _Where did they go?!”_ Charles demanded, spinning around, looking wildly between the others.

“Back to the Sentinel carrier,” Jean said grimly.

“We have to follow them—!”

But above the hole that had been blown in the ceiling, a terrible roaring noise came—the sound of an aircraft going supersonic—and Jean shook her head, despair weighing heavy on her shoulders. “They’ll be miles away,” she said. “The Professor might be able to track him, but—”

“Then let’s go find him now! We have to get them back—”

“Charles,” she said firmly, “they’ll need time to patch him up and get whatever they have that can send him back working, and we need time to regroup and come up with a plan. There were others in here.” She craned her head. “Blink? Scott?”

A groan behind a pile of rubble as Blink raised her head. A cry wrenched out of her as she tried to put weight on her right arm. “Here,” she groaned. “The others…”

“Taken,” Jean said grimly, picking her way across the field of debris. “Is Scott with you?”

Blink looked around and then cried out, a much worse sound than when she’d tried to move her broken arm. “Scott!”

At once, Jean was by her side, Alex not far behind; Raven was left to support Charles, who looked as though he was about to pass out at any second. Jean gasped as Scott came into sight; he looked _broken_ , and blood was seeping slowly out from under his bandaged eye. Blink, in spite of her own injuries, had come to kneel beside him, taking his pulse grimly with her good hand. “Alive,” she said. “But the power, it hurts his wound. That he is unconscious—I worry about bleeding in his head. My surgery room—Jean, can you move him without _moving him_ —?”

Jean held out a hand and carefully, without allowing a muscle to relax or a hair to droop out of place, lifted Scott in the air as though the ground itself had risen without shifting at all. She kept her breathing steady; beside her, she could feel Alex shaking, and he was taking up all the space to panic in the room. She stood from her crouch, keeping Scott level, and levitated him across the room, past where Charles had more or less collapsed in the doorway, past the barricades of concrete and splintered ceiling beams that had come down when the Sentinel carrier had blown a hole in the base. Blink’s surgery was just next door, and though bits of the wall had come down it had mostly been spared from the battle in the infirmary. She lay Scott down on a gurney, carefully lowering his limbs to rest. He groaned when she settled him back against the cloth, and her heart leapt—but he didn’t move otherwise, and Blink busily hovered over his head, holding a sort of scanner thing to his forehead and frowning at the readouts.

 _Jean_ , the Professor’s voice radiated in her head, _what happened? Hank says the Sentinels have departed—_

 _They took Logan and Magneto,_ Jean replied, using the Professor’s telepathy instead of her own stunted powers. She shoved a series of impressions and memories at him—what Logan had figured out about the Sentinels’ creation, Charles’s state, Scott’s and Blink’s injuries—and felt a rush of understanding. If she’d had her own powers, she would have been able to see behind the mask of calm serenity the Professor projected, see the fear and helplessness she knew lay behind the smooth glass walls of his mind, but she didn’t, and so she couldn’t. He was just the Professor to her at this moment, not the terribly human Charles Xavier, and she couldn’t help but feel grateful to lean on his strength. One terribly human Charles Xavier was enough for any given moment.

 _Hank and I will be there in a moment,_ he told her, and sure enough, only a minute or two later, Hank wheeled the Professor into sight. She remembered a time when the sight of him would have been enough to calm her pounding heart, to reassure her that everything would be okay. Raven dragged Charles outside to meet the Professor, and at once he latched onto him.

“Can you sense him? Is he…?”

“He’s still alive,” the Professor confirmed, and Charles sagged with relief. “And yes, I can find him.”

“Then we need to go to him _right now_ —”

“We will,” the Professor said. “Believe me, Charles, I’m not any more eager than you are to leave Erik in the hands of Stryker and TRASK. But we need a moment to regroup—we’ve lost good people rushing into an assault on TRASK headquarters before.”

“Is that where they’ve taken him?” Raven said tautly. The Professor nodded. Psylocke had told Jean that she’d shown the young Mystique all the files; she would know that they’d already lost the entirety of the assault team they’d sent to TRASK headquarters on two separate occasions. She would know that the building, stationed outside the main human strongholds, was structured like a death trap for mutants, a gauntlet of Sentinels.

“We’ll still need to evacuate,” Jean said, staring after the veil of plastic strips hanging between her and the surgery where Scott was lying. “Maybe not immediately, they’ll be busy with Magneto, but sooner or later they’ll send a carrier or three to wipe us out.”

“We’ll send everyone we can to assault the TRASK base,” Hank said. “A small team might be able to sneak in while the main forces are occupied fighting everyone else—”

“It’ll be me,” Jean said, her voice sounding very distant.

“Are you sure, Jean?” the Professor said, sounding like the kindly old man he’d once had the luxury of being. “Scott… Blink tells me his condition is critical.”

“In hard times, we all have to do hard things,” Jean repeated. “And you’ll need a telepath.”

“I’ll stay with Scott,” Alex said, and Jean nodded at him. Alex would take care of him. It was his job, after all.

“Psylocke can lead the diversionary raid,” Hank said, and unspoken was that it was unmistakably a suicide mission. “I’ll go. Proudstar, Jubilee, Rogue—we can buy you a little time.”

“And I’m coming with you,” Charles told Jean.

She shook her head at once. “No. The Professor was right—if you get killed now, who knows how history will change? If you’re not around to start the school, to form the X-Men… our present is already so bleak. Would you really ask us to risk what little we have? We need the Professor.”

“And I need Erik,” Charles said, and met her gaze levelly. And she understood the implied threat; let me come, or I will make sure that all of your concerns, all the things you need me to do, are a moot point anyway.

“Let him go,” the Professor said.

“What?” Jean said.

“I know that _I_ can’t go. But… how long has it been?” he asked Charles.

“Forty-six hours,” Charles said.

The Professor’s lips thinned. “Cutting it fine.”

“I didn’t exactly know that I’d be saving the future, okay?” Charles snapped.

“For another two hours, approximately,” the Professor said, turning back to her, “Charles can walk. Please, Jean. Let at least one of us be there for him.”

And she’d never been able to say no to him, even after he’d betrayed her with the lies—about the Phoenix, about her father, about herself. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s gather the troops.”

— ⓧ —

Erik woke in a wretchedly familiar place: on his back, strapped to an examining table, wrists and ankles captive in plastic cuffs. He wrenched at them half-heartedly and winced at the pain in his chest. It all came rushing back: the future, lying on that hospital cot with Charles, the Sentinels, turning to Logan and what he’d asked of him—and he’d failed. Bastard. How hard was it to kill someone? It seemed that Erik had spent his whole life trying desperately to pull his punches lest he accidentally take someone’s head off, and yet a man with metal claws who his enemies called _Wolverine_ couldn’t even murder him properly.

He yanked at his bonds fiercely and felt the old wounds open and begin to bleed. He growled through the pain, searching desperately for a weakness, a place they hadn’t been secured properly, and he scowled and kept fighting even as, behind him, someone began to laugh.

“You won’t get out of those, boy,” Stryker said, amusement rich in his voice. “We dug ‘em out of storage, special for you.”

“I will,” Erik gasped, because bluster was all he had, except for—oh, god, Charles. He hadn’t seen what had happened after he’d fallen unconscious—had Stryker and his Sentinels hurt him? God forbid, killed him? “I will and when I do I won’t kill you, not right away. I’ll make sure you _suffer_ first, the way I have done, the way you’ve hurt mutants you whole sorry, _Schweinepriester_ life—”

Stryker laughed, and Erik swore, redoubling his fight though the strain on his injuries meant he was growing faint. “You’d better hurry, Magneto,” he said, amused. “The boys in the lab tell me they’ll be ready to send you back to 1968 in a matter of hours. Something to do with time signatures and it being easier to send you back to a time you belong… because you belong with us, _Magneto.”_ Stryker crossed over in front of him, so that Erik could see him. A terrible smile swarmed, ugly and smug, over his face. “You thought you could help your kind? You thought you could do good things for them? You’re not a weapon, boy, and you’re sure not a general. You’re a disease. You’re a parasite. You exist to destroy everything you love. We’re just here to… speed the process.” He chuckled. “Literally.”

Erik snarled. But the bonds seemed to grow heavier, and the desire to just go limp, to give into despair, grew greater with every moment. “What the hell do you mean?”

Stryker’s eyes sparked with fervent, unholy glee. “You’ve seen the world. You’ve seen the sorry remnants that remain of the mutant population. When we took you, we didn’t bother with hardly anyone else—because we don’t have to. _We’re winning,_ Magneto. But imagine if we could somehow send back the scientific information we’ve collected on mutants since then to the past. If we had the Sentinels, ten, _twenty_ years before they developed naturally.” He stroked an absent hand down Erik’s calf, like a farmer with prizewinning livestock. Erik jerked in his bonds, but couldn’t move, couldn’t even throw him off. “You and the mutants have given us a rare opportunity. We’ll send you back to the loving arms of Trask Industries and Transigen, along with all the relevant data we’ve collected over the last _fifty-five years_. We’ll change history together, Magneto. And the cleansing of the Earth begins… with _you_.”

— ⓧ —

Without Erik to sense the Sentinels, Old Hank explained, they were flying blindly into the night, and only praying that Sentinels wouldn’t manage to intercept them before they got to TRASK headquarters. “This doesn’t seem like a plan so much as it does desperately doing something, anything, before it’s too late,” Raven pointed out.

Old Hank merely laughed helplessly. “…Prescient as always, Raven,” he said, and then didn’t seem to be able to come up with anything else.

As Psylocke bodily picked up Laura and escorted her to the Professor to keep her from stowing away _again_ on her father’s rescue mission, Charles clambered into the Blackbird. They had to take the plane because its supersonic capability, though rickety, was still functional; the others would be evacuating in the helicopter to a secondary location, one load at a time. Raven followed him inside, then hesitated when she saw that the only seat not yet taken by any of the adults who had volunteered for this suicide mission—nearly all of them, save Blink and Alex, who was looking after Scott, and the Professor, who was looking after the children—was next to Charles. (The others seemed to be giving him a wide berth—when he spared the brainpower to think about it, he wasn’t sure whether it was because they were intimidated by this younger, disreputable version of a man they so respected, or if because they could sense the agony and fear pouring off of him and had quite enough of their own concerns without dealing with his as well.) Slowly, Raven made her way over and sat down next to him. Charles closed his eyes and struggled for words.

“I’m sorry,” he finally blurted.

At least Raven looked amused. “Do you even know what you’re apologizing for, Charles?”

“Yes,” he said defensively. “I… I’m sorry for not listening to you. You were right, I’ve always been unfair to you and the others for… choosing to protect our people the way you did. I should’ve listened. And for that… for that, I think I’ll always have regrets.”

Raven tilted her head; her red hair fell over her face, a waterfall of color. “I… I don’t forgive you. Not yet. But if we survive this… I think I will eventually.”

He swallowed. It was more than he’d expected, anyway. But still the words nagged at him, still he ached to _know,_ though it hurt, though it might destroy him, the same impulse that had led him to open that file and digest the worst mistake of his life _._ “What happened to us, Raven?” he asked plaintively. “We used to be brother and sister.”

Raven’s fingers tapped on her thigh. “I met someone who treated me more like a sister than you ever did,” she said, and though her words were cruel, her voice was not. It was almost soft, like she knew how much Charles hurt to hear it, and regretted it, but thought it was necessary anyway. “All these years, you told me to hide who I was. You… you and Hank, at the most vulnerable time of my life, you made me feel… so _ugly,_ Charles. You were so excited to meet new mutants, but after you met me, you spent _years_ teaching me how to cover up, how to look human. Mutant and proud… but not for me. Not for _freaks_ like me.”

“That’s not—” Charles wanted to scream. Had he so thoroughly let down _everyone_ he’d ever loved in his life? Was he really such a half-wit without his powers to smooth the way? “I… I’m sorry, Raven. I never wanted you to feel… I was trying to _protect_ you. I. I,” he said, struggling to find the words. “Part of me always knew… that _this_ , all of this, the Sentinels, the genocide—might happen. That Erik might be right after all, that they couldn’t accept us. I hoped, and I thought that hope was worth risking myself—and I still do—but I loved you so much, and I didn’t want to risk you. So often, I wished you were human because… I never wanted you to be afraid. And I knew that being a mutant… was a reason to be afraid.”

Raven was looking away now, and he desperately wanted to see her eyes. He’d never been good at reading her, especially not in her blue form; the day she had asked him to stay out of his head was the last moment he felt that he really knew her, unequivocally, better than anyone else in the world. But then she sniffled, and he knew exactly what she was feeling with a clarity he’d never had without his telepathy, and before he could think he’d put his arms around her, and she fairly crumpled into him, hot tears smeared against his cheek and trickling onto his collarbone.

“It felt like you were abandoning us,” she whispered, and he closed his eyes and squeezed her tight and ached for her and for Erik and his friends, whom he’d opened his house to and then failed to listen to, who he had, in the end, like Raven said, betrayed. “I was scared— _we_ were scared—and we thought we were coming home—and you were so _angry_ —”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he gasped into her hair, and she hugged him back, and they were both crying moments before they took off on a rescue mission to save the love of his life and possibly the entire future, and everyone around them was looking at them with the realization that their perfect Professor was a fuck-up and an idiot just like the rest of them, and he didn’t even care, that was a problem for his older self, because his sister was in his arms. He thought of Erik folded around them, holding them both, and felt his heart throb in such pain he wondered if it would split in two—one half for Raven and one half for Erik and none left for himself—and swore that he would make it happen. If it was the last thing he ever did, he would bring Erik home. To both of them.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	22. 2023: Stop, Fall, Shatter

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

There weren’t enough seats on the Blackbird for everyone who’d volunteered for the suicide portion of the mission, even with the bench seats in the back. Most people stood as Hank maneuvered deftly through the air, using only the skyline and a device he’d hacked together tracking energy expenditures to avoid Sentinel carriers. Charles glanced from face to face, memorizing the people who were prepared to die, for the future of mutantkind… and for Erik. 

“Most of them knew Magneto,” Jean had told him as she’d settled next to him. “And most of them would’ve given anything to save him.” And it had rushed home to him them, the implications of the conspicuous absence of Erik’s older self, which he had been unconsciously avoiding thinking of. The sadness in Xavier’s eyes, the way the warriors’ gazes had followed him with something a little more than the way they’d surveyed Charles: grief. In this world, Erik was dead, and he’d had to go on without him. He’d hunched over briefly and struggled to battle down his nausea, a sure sign that Hank’s serum was wearing off as well as a deeply emotional reaction—he’d always thrown up when he was nervous or upset, Raven had used to tease him about his sensitive stomach—he’d thought about living without Erik, all the times that Erik could’ve died in the scant five years that Trask Industries had had him, and had no choice but to close his eyes his eyes against the injustice of it all.

“We’re approaching TRASK,” Hank called back (the intercom system on the Blackbird was apparently one of the things that the apocalypse had taken from them). “I’ll circle around, we’ll drop half of you on the carrier at each side of the building. That should draw the guards and the Sentinels stationed around the building away. Then I’ll drop Jean and Charles on the roof. From there, you’ll have ten minutes to get in and out with Erik and Logan, if he’s still alive.” What no one was saying was that ten minutes was a generous estimate: for all that nearly all the adult mutants were here and ready to fight, there were still only a handful, and up against an entire carrier of Sentinels, they would be easy pickings. 

Raven— _Mystique—_ would jump with the first group. As she stood, Charles caught her hand. “Raven—” he said, struggling, once again, for the right words.

She squeezed his hand. “I know,” she said, “bring him home,” and then she was gone, and where she had been before, only empty air. He closed his eyes and marveled at how she always knew what to say, even without telepathy.

 _Be safe_ , he thought at her.

 _You too_ , came the faintest whisper of her mind, and his eyes blinked open with surprise. His telepathy was returning, which meant—

They let the second group down and caught the attention of a Sentinel on the way up. Hank narrowly dodged the thing in flight, and threw the Blackbird into a tight curve that caused Charles to scramble for a handhold, despite being strapped in himself. Beside him, Jean was quiet and still as stone. “Coming up on the drop point in forty-five seconds,” Old Hank said. “I have a feeling I’ll be shaking this Sentinel off for a while so I won’t have time to linger.”

Jean unstrapped herself and took Charles’s hand; hesitantly, he released his seatbelt and blinked when he felt himself steady as a result of her telekinesis. Marvelous, he thought. “Three,” Old Hank said. “Two. One.”

Jean launched them both out the open door of the Blackbird, and Charles felt what it was to fly.

They barreled down, the wind whipping his hair into his mouth and squeezing tears into his eyes, and Jean drew him closer, her arms around him, the lights of the building growing larger and larger like the headlights of an oncoming train—and then they started to slow, still moving fast, until they touched down as softly and swiftly as if they’d merely hopped to the ground from a few feet up. Charles got his bearings as Jean, the soldier and the professional, clicked on a slim, powerful flashlight and found the hatch of a skylight ten feet from them. She ran a hand over the latch and it clicked open with no regard for the high-tech keypad beside it; she’d merely moved the internal gears aside with her mind.

Charles clambered down. Jean used the same telekinetic trick to cushion their fall from the skylight, and they moved swiftly from the dark laboratory, which was horribly reminiscent of the labs at Oxford, down to the coats and aprons haphazardly hung from the back of the door and the glassware drying by the sink that the students had been too lazy to put away, into a hallway. “Beast said the greatest energy expenditure was two floors below us,” she said. “That’ll be the time machine. They’ll be keeping Magneto nearby.”

Charles nodded briskly and two of them crept down the hallway, keeping to the shadows although there was no one in sight. They almost made it to the stairs.

A man in fatigues, jogging toward the stairs in the opposite direction, froze and scrambled for his gun the moment he saw them. Instantly, Jean threw out a hand and groaned as she slipped into his mind, peeling back the memory of seeing them from the layers of his mind. It wasn’t a particularly finicky process, Charles knew from experience, but it did take some skill, and Jean was panting by the time he holstered his weapon and continued his run toward the stairs, heading down to join the battle. He grasped her hand. Brusquely, she jerked out of his grip and turned toward the stairs herself.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to do that again,” she said. “So let’s hurry.”

Except on the stairs they encountered a passel of scientists milling out of the floor below, chattering about heading down to an underground bunker until the danger had passed. Jean and Charles froze on the steps above them, praying that they wouldn’t be seen—but no such luck. A woman saw them, pointed, screamed. The scientists reached for their own holsters—they were carrying smaller guns than the guard had been, but it seemed in this time everyone walked around armed, because it was a _hellscape_.

Jean pressed her hand to her forehead and gasped, and a few of the scientists blinked, looking around for the disturbance—but a few more had drawn and were aiming—

Charles reached out for her hand again and without thinking cast his mind over the remaining humans. It was a shock, like plunging into icy water after such a long time in arid hot air, and it hurt—but then he felt the brush of Jean’s mind, the flames of it licking warmly against his own shields, and he sank into her power with a sigh, and the men and women below them stopped moving. They holstered their guns. They continued downstairs without incident.

Two weak telepaths, it seemed, could do the work of a good one. Tremulously, Jean smiled, and they continued down.

Like a dam had burst, his telepathy was coming back now. He caught flickers of the minds all around him—a lash of fear here, a sick sense of satisfaction there—but though he cast out for Erik’s mind, that luminous, glorious mind that he would know anywhere, he met with nothing. It was his abilities, sluggish and slow, he told himself, not that there was nothing to find—please, Xavier had said that he was alive—please, let them not have decided that his corpse was good enough to harvest the material to create the Sentinels—Jean took his elbow and led him to the landing they needed.

The hall they exited on was, to their mutual relief, deserted. “Center of the building,” Jean said. “That’s where Beast said the power core is located.” And sure enough, the hallway narrowed to a heavy steel sliding door. Jean moved toward it purposefully, and so did Charles, his heart pounding, his palms sweating. It had been so long since he’d been in the field—since Cuba—it had been so long since he could rely on himself to do what needed to be done.

_Erik, please. Erik, please be alive._

They were halfway down the hall when his legs gave out under him.

He staggered and managed to catch himself on the wall; his knees were buckling, but he could still feel them, pins and needles running up and down his legs as feeling abruptly rushed back into them from where they’d gone briefly, terribly numb. Without asking, without question, Jean reached for him and slung his arm around her shoulders. She was taller than him by a couple of inches, and he nearly slipped and fell a few times, but they made their way down to the end of the hall together, him leaning on her body, her leaning on his mind.

With a terrible grinding noise, the door scraped open; Jean waved it away. Inside the chamber, lined with a terribly familiar reflective foil material was—

“Erik!” Charles cried out. Erik didn’t twitch. He looked dead, lying there on an examining table—made of metal?—and Charles’s cry for him turned into a wordless cry of pain—surely that would wake Erik up, Erik could never turn away from Charles when he begged for him—he flung himself through the door into the room—

—and immediately collapsed, his head ringing out with agony like he’d never felt before, not even when he’d been shot, not even when the constant crush of minds all around him had led him to ask Hank to make the dreams go away. Beside him, Jean, who had followed him inside, also cried out and dropped to her knees. It felt like someone had struck a gong inside his head, had taken a baseball bat to his skull—he cried out again, more thought than voice, but even then it echoed inside his head in a way that made him feel terribly alone: _Erik—!_

“Anti-telepathic field,” drawled the man who had taken Erik, who was standing at a control panel. Leaning next to him was a man with a mechanical hand, who was holding a gun was pointed directly at them. “It actually stunts the use of all mutant powers that are controlled by the conscious mind, including your magnetopathic friend there. Particularly rough on telepaths, though, I’m told. I should thank Xavier for not having the sense to send someone like our dear Wolverine… now that might have been a challenge.”

Crumpled in agony, Charles felt like his thoughts were suspended in molasses. It hurt to think, much less concentrate enough to freeze or control the men in front of him. He’d come so far, only to falter at this last hurdle. A formless wave of _sorry_ radiated out from him toward Erik. He hoped he heard him.

But beside him, Jean shifted into a crouch.

Through gritted teeth, she said, “I’m not a telepath, at least not one worth a damn. You saw to that. What I _am_ … is an Omega-level telekinetic.”

She threw up her hands and at once the men at the control panel stopped moving. “Go!” she shouted at Charles. “My head—I can’t hold them forever—”

So Charles forced himself upright and began to stagger to the metal examination table in the center of the room. He could feel his legs protesting the movement, sensation fading in and out; he fell once, then again; he still couldn’t think worth a damn. But he didn’t need to think. He only needed to get to Erik. And that was more natural to him than breathing, more natural to him than telepathy; if it was the only thing left in the world, he could do it.

He stumbled into the table and caught himself, brushed fingers against the pulse point on Erik’s throat, nearly cried with relief when he felt it, steady and strong. “Erik,” he gasped, “Erik,” and his head pounded and he couldn’t think of anything else to say, but that was enough, that name spoken to that man, alive, breathing, was enough.

Erik slowly turned his head to him, his eyes glazed. “…Charles?” he slurred.

 _Erik,_ he thought, and, agony be damned, sank into that beautiful mind. It was just how he remembered it, brilliant and colorful and ordered and bright, like a hall of mirrors stained in beautiful colors, deceptive and delightful, with a geometric patterning to it all like a horologium, wheels turning within wheels and the orbits of the planets keeping perfect time. It was warm and open and welcoming, and he sank into it like a man dying of thirst plunging his head into a stream, nearly sobbing with the relief of it, this was what he had missed, this was the wound that had never healed, this was what had driven him to rob himself of his powers, which he’d once took such delight in. 

“Get him _out_ of here!” Jean shouted.

Right. Right. Charles fumbled for the straps holding him down, his fingers clumsy with pain. He freed his wrists first, then his ankles—before his legs gave out entirely and he slumped to the floor, cursing that the serum hadn’t lasted just a minute longer—and yet so ecstatically intertwined with Erik’s mind, at last, at _long_ last, that he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. He dragged Erik down with him—he heard his _oof_ as he hit the floor—but that was it, that was all he had the strength for. He couldn’t get Erik out, he couldn’t keep him safe.

He could die with him, and that was good enough. He could die protecting him, and that was good enough.

Across the room, Jean cried out, and the man with the gun had broken free, he spun, pointing the gun at Charles—

—and Charles slipped totally into Erik’s mind one last time—

—and the pain stopped. Erik sheltering him, shielding him from the abrasiveness of the world, the way he always had. They were sitting… somewhere as gray and featureless as a bank of cloud, and that was worrisome, because Erik’s mind had always conjured images so vividly; perhaps this was an effect of the anti-telepathic signal, or a sign of the cracks in Erik’s mind that he’d suffered after years of torture. Charles wished he had the time to heal them, to slowly close those cracks, whatever the cause. They were sitting across from each other. A chessboard lay between them.

Charles looked at the game. It was the game they’d been playing before Erik had left for Dallas. “You remembered,” he said, touched.

“I’ve played this game a thousand times,” Erik told him. He was wearing the same white Velcroed-on prisoner’s uniform he’d been wearing when they’d broken him out, and Charles ached to see this change in his self-image, the way he thought of himself as a prisoner first. “I always got as far as putting you in check. I could never figure out how to end it, though. How you would react to that first check.”

Charles reached out, ran a ghosting touch down Erik’s index finger. Erik watched him, but didn’t flinch away; his mind lacked the muscle memory of pain that told him to brace for agony at all times. “You were winning,” he remembered.

“Check in four,” Erik said.

Charles glanced down at the board, and the pieces zoomed through the next four moves in fast-forward. He smiled. Erik had gotten his strategy exactly right. He moved his king out of danger.

“I could never figure out what you would do next,” Erik said. “Castle your king or try to promote your pawn.”

“Castle,” Charles said. “You have to protect what’s important to you.”

“Yes,” Erik said, “you do.”

And in the space of their linked minds, Charles could feel Erik spread out his awareness of the world around him, that unique sense of metal to which he’d never felt anything remotely similar. He felt Erik _push_ , the same way Jean had pushed through the pain to use her telekinesis, the same way Charles had dove into Erik’s mind without regard for the agony that would result, and he felt the bullet that the man with the metal hand had fired clatter to the floor; he felt the control console melt into so much slag—and then he felt _everything—_  
  
  
  
Raven crying out as a Sentinel struck her in the stomach, and freezing as from the Sentinel’s chest protruded a set of metal claws—and Logan swiped the Sentinel aside, wild- and frenzied-looking, like he’d just escaped from some mad scientist’s laboratory but also like it was something he was used to—and he pounced on the Sentinels like the wrath of god—  
  
  
  
—and farther out, Blink biting her lip as she tried to adjust the drill against Scott’s head with a broken arm—finally turning to Alex and saying, “You. Be my hands”—  
  
  
  
—and farther out, Laura, watching the Professor carefully as fear gripped him, his eyes a thousand miles away. His hands shook on the arms of his wheelchair. “Professor,” she said, “tus manos—”  
  
  
  
—and _there._

 _Knock knock,_ Charles said.

Xavier started. _Charles?_

Somewhere, Charles had propped himself up against a wall, Erik’s head in his lap, his fingers curling through Erik’s short hair, their minds wrapped up in each other. They filled in the gaps that had plagued them for so long, sealing the broken pieces shut inside them, as Jean got to her feet, the telepathic interference gone, now holding the men Charles now knew were called William Stryker and Donald Pierce in place easily. Somewhere else, Charles was reaching out to a mind as familiar as Erik’s and as unfamiliar as a stranger’s, a mind of vast warmth and sorrow, and was marveling at the textures of it, the strangeness of it, that this was who he became, or perhaps already was. He’d never been able to read his own mind until now. _Erik needs our help,_ he told his future self, who he could now see clearly _was_ himself—they had the same bones, himself and Xavier, and in Xavier’s mind he could see the same constellation of things he himself felt for Erik: the joy of knowing him, the desire to protect him, the fear for where his anger might lead him, the regret for having failed him, the boundless, exhaustive, tender love. 

_What do you need me to do?_

_Lend us your power._

It came to him in a hot rush of awareness—like nothing he’d ever been able to feel before without accessing Cerebro—the sudden doubling of his strength, almost unbearable but for the way Erik’s mind instinctively cushioned him from the worst excesses of the world, newly revealed to his senses. He felt as though he could encompass the globe entire—no—he _was_ enfolding the earth within his mind—and it ached and it strained but he held it. He held the line.

 _Erik,_ he thought, his voice strangely doubled in his own head, _let us help._

And Erik let him in.

Erik’s mental world was badly shaken by the torture he’d undergone, patched into something resembling sanity only through sheer force of will and what he could feel were Xavier’s gentle mental nudges—a soothed nightmare here, a resurrected memory of happiness there. His connection to his own power, in particular, had been rattled apart by the years of torment that had so reminded him of the camps, that had taken him to a mental place in which he was weak and helpless and unable to so much as move a coin. Charles welded that back together first, smoothing the jagged edges of his own fear of himself into simple assurance of what he was capable of, neatly tugging shut the ragged tears that pain had created in his own self-control.

He moved on to the memories of trauma that kept popping up and distracting Erik (and, in turn, Charles) each time he tried to focus and gently, gently drained them of their vibrancy, their blood red madness. He examined each one, committing a small fraction of its horror and its agony to his own mind—a burden shared and all that, but mostly a reminder of what his short-sightedness had cost him, and worse, what it had cost Erik. Next, he reached for the brightest strand of Erik’s web of memory, the scene that had enabled him to turn the satellite… and felt surprise flit through him as he found not the shabbat memory he’d been looking for, but—

 _August in New York, and it was sweltering, and Charles had rolled up his sleeves but was still sweating prettily in the twilight. He was tapping his fingers on his lips in thought as he surveyed the chessboard set up between them_ (mate in three) _, pausing every other moment to wipe at his forehead with a handkerchief, absurd man. Usually after dinner they had wine, but today Alex had made his mother’s lemonade and so they’d retired to the balcony with a sweating pitcher of sweet iced lemonade and at one point, Charles, like a savage, had just started drinking straight out of the pitcher, which Erik only allowed because he loved him._

_Loved him._

_They hadn’t said it since Cuba, but Erik thought, with the fierce certainty that he’d once reserved for the fact that he was going to kill Sebastian Shaw, that even if they never said it again, Erik loved him. Loved the way his eyes crinkled when he thought he’d come up with a winning strategy, loved his vanity and arrogance, loved his fundamentally kind and generous heart. Loved his clever fingers on the chessboard and his red, red lips and his naïveté, loved his laugh and the mischievous glint in his eyes when he was about to say something that would probably end in them running away from the authorities and his stupid, unstrategic habit of holding his fingers up to his temple when he was using his powers. Loved his foolishness, loved foolishly, loved with such absolute abandonment in that moment that the rest of the world could burn and he would be happy so long as Charles’s hand was in his. Loved him enough to give up his ideals. To settle for what was second-best for their kind. That he loved Charles enough to fight for him was not even a question; that he loved him enough to try peace for him was a surprise… perhaps even to them both._

_Around them, crickets sang boisterously; below, the lights of fireflies twanged in the dark. Charles moved a knight. And Erik Lehnsherr leaned back, eyes closed, breathing in the sweet scent of over-sugared lemonade and Charles’s sweat, dizzily, wonderfully, heedlessly in love._

—and on his physical cheeks he could feel tears, and he wasn’t sure if they were his or Xavier’s or possibly both of theirs, if it mattered, if the division between them even still existed in any real way. The world had opened to them like a slow-blooming flower, but they were lost in Erik’s mind, tangled up in his love for them, that tremendous, delicate thing that had survived, against all odds, that had endured for them to touch it in this moment and savor the sweet pain that went through them. Madness, this. The most tantalizing madness he had ever touched.

An incredible thing was happening. Through Erik, he could feel the metal slab beside him, the wreckage beside Stryker and Pierce that once was the anti-telepathic signal’s control console, the metal of the guns of the guards drifting around them—and further, the Blackbird’s deft mid-air maneuvers—and further, the metal of the Sentinels as they wage a war on their allies and comrades—and further, the massive metal pull of Sentinel carriers, like planetary bodies distorting gravity—and further even than that. _Reach down,_ Charles told him. _Find the strength I know you have in you._

And Erik reached down, and the magnetic force of the Earth itself rose to meet them.

They were caught in a feedback loop—Erik, patching the holes in Charles’s mental defenses, allowing Charles to soothe his fevered mind, to help him access the power that rightfully belonged to him, and Charles, whose power was not doubled by Xavier’s but squared, cubed, growing exponentially, projecting that new strength across the globe, and Erik, uncovering, with dusty hands, a well of strength he’d never known before, a strength that grew from the very core of the earth, and Charles, and Erik, and Charles—they could do anything, Charles knew in an instant of perfect clarity. They could end the war, all wars. They could exterminate humankind in a heartbeat. They could wrap themselves up in each other so well that they would never have to be apart again.

Instead, all Erik thought was— _Stop._

And the Sentinels stopped. All of them. They all. Stopped. Everywhere.

 _Fall,_ Erik thought, or maybe Charles thought, or maybe it didn’t matter where one of them ended and one of them began, because for a brief, blistering moment, they were in perfect agreement—

—and all the Sentinels fell.

 _Shatter,_ both of them thought.

And they did. And all Stryker’s horses, and all of TRASK’s men wouldn’t be able to put them together again.

— ⓧ —

Charles came back to himself with a gasp, his head pounding, feeling disoriented from having been simultaneously stretched out between three bodies (and the world) and snapping back into just his own. If it was his own. He touched at his hair, then stroked a finger down the bridge of Erik’s nose, where he was sprawled in his lap, just to be sure. “Erik,” he gasped, when his breath came back to him, “Erik, you did it. Erik, you saved them—”

But Erik’s eyes were half-closed, and he didn’t stir.

“Erik. _Erik?_ Erik?! Erik!”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	23. 2023: That's How the Light Gets In

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

“Erik,” Charles whispered, confidential as a secret, “wake up.”

Blink, her arm splinted and her eyes weary from conducting surgery on Scott without touching him, had said that Erik just needed rest. She hadn’t even insisted that she keep an eye on him, just waved them both off to Xavier’s bedroom, which everyone seemed to assume was just Erik’s by rights, though no one seemed to make the same allowance for Charles. So Charles sat now in a spare wheelchair beside his older self’s bed, and held Erik’s hand, and watched his sleeping eyes dart behind their eyelids, willing him to wake up, perpetually holding himself back from using his refound telepathy to reach out and brush his mind, which Blink had expressly forbidden, for both his own sake and Erik’s. “Nearly give Professor an aneurysm,” she’d grumbled. “Rest. You don’t want to make you.”

“I can’t rest while Erik is…” he’d trailed off, not sure if he was even capable of finishing that sentence. Hurt. Unconscious. _In a bloody coma from power exhaustion._

“Then sit next to him and think quietly,” she’d snapped, and bustled off to where Jean was all but wrestling Logan back into a hospital bed as he protested loudly that the red and weeping burn the Sentinel beam had seared into his skull could heal anywhere else just as well.

So that was what he was trying to do—sitting next to Erik and thinking quietly—but she hadn’t said anything about talking to him, and, well. Wasn’t that a thing? That people in comas could hear if you spoke to them? There was so much that he’d wanted to say, accumulated over the last five years and then spilled over when he’d learned the truth of Erik’s imprisonment, all variations on _I’ve missed you_ and _I’m sorry_ and _Forgive me_ , but he’d said them all already, so instead he was speaking about mundane things, about Hank’s newest invention and how Idie Okonkwo had grown since Erik had last seen her and his feelings about his reconciliation with Raven. And whispering, sweetly, at irregular intervals, _Erik, wake up_ , like a lover. 

Erik slept on, shadows running deep under his eyes, and Charles couldn’t help but reach out to try to smooth them away every so often. _Sleeping Beauty_ , he thought, though Erik was drooling messily, though Erik looked more like exhaustion had beaten him into an uneasy sleep than like he’d drifted neatly off, Erik was _his_ again, his to watch over, his to protect, and that made him beautiful. “Erik,” he said, and this time didn’t continue, couldn’t beg him to wake when he looked so lost, so tired, so adrift. “Erik,” he said again instead.

“Rest, then, if you must,” Charles began, slow and syrupy, voice steady, even though he wasn’t sure what he was saying until the words were out, like an incantation. “I’ll be here. I can wait for you, I know that I’m capable of that, now. We have until the end of the world together, don’t we?” He ran careful fingers through Erik’s hair; he _murr_ ed and stirred into the touch. Charles smiled, savoring how instinctive it was, how he was growing used to Charles’s touch, not flinching away like he had before. “You know… even when I was at my lowest, I never really tried to _move on,_ exactly. It was like I knew that I would never find anything better than those golden days when you were at the school with me, asking me to be the best of myself. Like _I_ would never be better than I was during that time.”

He took Erik’s hand and brushed his mouth across his knuckles, across the raw lines around his wrists where he’d struggled against his bonds. “I never liked the person I was until I met you, you know. And when you were gone… I stopped liking myself again.

“My older self looked at me sometimes, and I could tell he was comparing the difference between me-without-you and the person I became with you by my side.” A little laugh. “I don’t think he likes me very much, either. I think he’s embarrassed of me. I’m… _I’m_ embarrassed of me. When we get home, you’ll find out… about everything I’ve been doing for the past few years—or rather, not been doing. We’ll fight, I expect. I never really thought how much my desire for our people to be all right was wrapped up in you and your… _you_ -ness, until you weren’t there to argue with me over mutant separatism anymore, until you weren’t there to remind me that atrocities were always happening, at every moment. I… Raven was right. I abandoned them, our people, when I shut down the school. I should’ve kept going. But I couldn’t, without you. I just couldn’t. You’re the one who keeps me strong, Erik. You’re the one who shows me how to be what I need to be.” He thought of the hard lines in Xavier’s face, the brusqueness with which he commanded his former students, his affected hardness that Charles himself found the thought of taking on unimaginable.

“There’s another way he looks at me, and I think it’s jealousy,” he confessed lowly. “I think…” he laughed incredulously. “I think he wants to keep you, actually. I think he thinks he’d take better care of you than I would. And maybe he’s even right. Maybe that’s the wisdom of age. But that’s too bad, because you’re _mine,_ Erik, he _had_ his chance and if he regrets what he did with it, that’s his own fault, all the years of your future belong to _me_ , you’re mine to protect and hold on to and put back together and…” _and love._ But it still felt wrong to say it when Erik’s eyes weren’t open to witness it; they’d wasted so much time _not_ saying it to each other, he wanted Erik to be awake and aware every time he said in the future, so that there could never be any mistake what the most important thing to Charles was. They’d lost twenty-seven years and more to that mistake the first time around, and now, through some trick of fate, like prising jewels from the jaw of the earth, they had most of those precious years back.

Charles knew, now, what the shape of his greatest regret might look like, and he knew what was required of him to ensure that it would never come to pass. And it started with telling Erik. Every day.

“As soon as you wake up,” he promised Erik’s sleeping form, and pressed his forehead into Erik’s shoulder, inhaling the scent he’d never forgotten, the one that was purely Erik. “You never did finish telling me how right you were, you know. About the Sentinels. About the future. You ought to, when you wake up, because I know what I’m going to say to you now. That it doesn’t matter. That this world is not our future. That you and I are stronger together, stronger than _they_ were, divided and alone. That I won’t leave you again, that I won’t leave you to the wolves again, that you won’t leave me behind again.”

Outside their room, he could feel the rough outlines of a familiar consciousness drift by them, and he wanted to cry. Raven. Raven’s mind again, after all these years. He didn’t dive any more deeply, both because of the promise he’d made to her and because of Blink’s actually incredible capacity for intimidation when she was telling her patients to rest their overtaxed abilities, but he felt it when she hesitated outside their door, and perhaps that was why he said what he did next.

“You and I.” He took a shuddering breath. “You and I against the world, Erik. And we will survive. This time, we’ll survive.”

A complicated moil of emotions was churning in Raven’s mind, but when she drifted off, what Charles could feel first and foremost was relief. Relief, at last, that her naïve, arrogant brother finally _got it_ , over a thin veneer of sorrow that he hadn’t been able to _get it_ for her.

— ⓧ —

_“‘Guenever knew that Lancelot would come back to her. She had known it from the moment when he had prayed to be ‘held.’ The knowledge had revived her like a watered flower too long left unwatered. It had swept away the rouge and bedizening silks which had moved his pity when he first came back. Now it only remained for her to accomplish the reunion…’”_

Charles’s voice, smooth and rich, coaxed him out of sleep and into the world of the waking like a man reeled in on a fishing line. Lazily, Erik blinked his eyes open. The low ceiling and messy stacks of papers were not quite familiar, but close enough that he recognized where he was immediately: the Professor’s room, where he’d woken after he’d collapsed in the future. He turned his head to the side and was greeted with Charles, back in a wheelchair but looking better-groomed than he had the entire time since he’d broken Erik out of prison, reading steadily and sweetly from a cracked-open book so worn that the spine had flaked away. Still, Erik thought he knew what Charles had chosen to read to him; they’d spoken enough of a Once and Future Kingdom for mutants, on their more optimistic, wine-drenched evenings together.

“What are you reading?” he rasped out, surprised at the hoarseness of his voice. How long had he been asleep?

“Dr. King’s _Stride Toward Freedom,_ ” Charles said primly. Erik laughed, a rusty, creaking sound.

“You’re a terrible liar, Charles.”

“I know.” Charles put the book aside and smiled at him. He reached out slowly, telegraphing his movements, and neatened Erik’s no doubt terrible bedhead. Erik was pathetically grateful for the deliberateness of his touch, his gentleness; he didn’t want to flinch from Charles, not again. “Hello again.”

“Charles,” Erik sighed, savoring the curves and dips of his name. “What happened?”

Charles’s eyes softened immediately, crinkling into something warm and proud, and Erik knew even before he spoke that it would be all right. “You did it, Erik. You shut down the Sentinels.”

A wave of relief so powerful it felt like exhaustion swept through him, weighed down his limbs. He’d done it. He’d been useful. Now he could, at last, rest, until the rest of him felt up for being useful again. “The others?”

Charles hesitated, and Erik felt bile rise in his throat. Not good enough, then, it seemed. “A few casualties,” Charles said delicately. “Miss Bell—you remember her, charming woman, manipulates time—was badly injured. And we lost Psylocke. But Erik—everyone agrees. They were expecting much worse. They were expecting, in fact, no one to return from that last mission.”

“To rescue me,” Erik said dully.

“And Logan,” Charles said, “who is fine, by the way, broke out of the cell he was being held in and joined the fight even when his skull was being held together with tissue paper, as I understand it… and to rescue their last and best hope for a future. And you gave it to them, Erik. Without the Sentinels, the human strongholds have already begun negotiations for a ceasefire. They’re talking about relocating to a permanent settlement… somewhere not as bastardly cold, hopefully. They’re talking about rebuilding, Erik. That’s down to you.”

Erik closed his eyes and reclined back in the bed, not sure what he was feeling. Relief, certainly, that he hadn’t turned out to be quite as useless as he thought—sorrow—exhaustion—and distantly, a muted, fierce joy. Rebuilding. He was quietly awed at the strength of his people, that they could suffer so much, resign themselves to extinction, and then, the moment a glimmer of hope was presented, speak about _rebuilding_. It reminded him, terribly, painfully, of Charles. “Scott? Blink?”

“Blink’s been taking care of you.” Charles hesitated. Again, ice through his veins. “Scott was injured pretty badly—there was some bleeding in his brain—but he’s recovering well, Blink says. Alex and Jean have just started to feel comfortable leaving his side for things like food and showers.”

Erik’s gaze settled on the wheelchair, and his feelings must have been writ large on his face, because Charles stiffened, then relaxed in increments, still running his fingers through Erik’s hair. “And you?” he asked quietly.

“I…” Charles hesitated. “Hank’s serum was… a substitute for something I thought I would never have again. And like all substances of that nature, addictive. I spent a while withdrawing, throwing up in the bathroom, but… I’m fine now.” A tremulous smile. “In fact… I feel better than I’ve been in a long, long time.”

A quiet nudge at the corner of his mind and Erik gasped as he let Charles in instinctively, and their consciousnesses flooded together. The sea of Charles’s mind lapping over every nook and cranny in Erik’s tattered mindscape, filling in the gaps that his presence had left when Erik had forcibly shoved Charles’s mind out of his and the cracks that hadn’t been there the last time he’d been inside Erik’s mind. It was the sweetest sensation, the only thing Erik could think to compare it to was fresh air after five years of imprisonment underground, and it wasn’t until Charles, tears in his own eyes, swiped a thumb over Erik’s cheekbones and it came away wet that he realized he was crying.

“They say,” Charles said quietly, “that when you’re fully rested, we can go home.”

“Home?” Erik asked, dazed.

Charles returned to fussing with Erik’s hair. “If you don’t want to, of course, I… I didn’t mean to presume… I want you to return with me, of course, but if you don’t want to, I’m sure Raven can work something out with, with the Brotherhood… I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable or pressured—” but Erik could sense underneath the roil of Charles’s mind a great well of insecurity, and with what felt like a massive effort, he reached out and soothed it, and Charles felt silent.

“That’s not what I meant,” Erik said. “I just… it is still my home? I never thought… all those years… I never thought I would be lucky enough to be able to return and call it _home._ ”

Charles’s expression crumpled. “I won’t lie, there… there was a time when you wouldn’t have been welcome, but… but it _wasn’t right_ without you, Erik. I shut the school down because I couldn’t bear to keep it running without you, with your ghost there like a permanent hole in the air beside me. It’s your home as much as mine, and that’s why… when you were gone, it felt like a mausoleum again. Please, come home with me. I don’t want to face it alone.”

“You shut down the school?” Erik asked, feeling out of his depth again. “But… that was what you always wanted… more than anything. It was your dream—”

“ _You_ are my dream,” Charles said fiercely. “You and the students and a future for our people, but _my_ future can do nothing but include you. Erik… I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t come for you, I’m sorry I didn’t even ask, I’m sorry I just assumed you didn’t want me anymore. Forgive me, please.”

Erik looked at him. He thought that perhaps he should be more angry, that he should blame Charles for not coming for him for all these years—but he’d taken Charles’s ability to fight from him, hadn’t he? From the moment the Professor had entered his mind ten minutes into his sojourn to the future, he’d felt the cracks of hurt closing over just from being in the simple presence of a mind that loved him. He reached out and stroked the arm of Charles’s wheelchair, then slipped his fingers over Charles’s pulse. “What do we say,” he said slowly, “that we forgive each other. For all the pain we’ve caused, and endured.”

Charles smiled tearfully. “I’d like that,” he said, but in his mind, he thought, _I love you._

“I love you,” Erik said, and for a brief, radiant moment, all was well. All was well.

— ⓧ —

By the time Forge reported that the time machine was functional again after the Sentinels’ assault on the base had damaged some delicate internal wiring, Erik was able to stand upright, but would falter after a while on his feet. He insisted on wheeling Charles to the workshop, but Charles suspected it was as much so that Erik could lean on the handles as it was about doing something for him. He smiled, said nothing, let Erik have his moment.

As they waited for Raven and Alex to join them, the other mutants came out to greet them. It was, in a strange way, like a reverse of the scene that had greeted them when they’d first stumbled out of the star chamber into the parade ground of staring eyes and whispering mouths. Now, they met Charles and Erik’s eyes and smiled warmly at them, offered their hands, whispered benedictions and made little jokes about time travel. “Try not to think too badly of me when we meet,” Warpath told Charles with a wink. “It’s all in the past now.”

Logan and Jean waited for them at the end of the procession, and flanked them on either side as they entered the workshop, leaving the gaggle of mutants behind. “Professor got held up,” Logan grunted. “He’ll be here in a sec. Good to see you up and about,” he said to Erik.

“No thanks to you,” Erik grumbled. “I ask the man with the metal claws to kill me, and all he does is puncture a lung.”

“Be _quiet_ ,” Charles hissed. But Logan just chuckled, a dark, meaning-laden sound. 

“Sorry about that,” he said. “It usually works. You’re pretty tough, Magneto.”

Erik tilted his chin up proudly, and Charles loved him in spite of himself. A low murmur went up behind him, and Charles turned to see Xavier coming down the hallway, being pushed by Raven, Alex at her side. They were discussing something in low tones, and Charles recognized the way they lapsed into silence every now and then, the discussion clearly still happening in their minds. When they got to the workshop, Alex nodded sharply and turned away. Raven looked at Charles, a little despondent, and Charles saw the way her eyes were rimmed with red before she blinked and their usual yellow reappeared.

“What happened?” he asked Alex.

“We asked if we could stay,” Alex said, and Charles started. _Why_ , he wanted to blurt out—this world was so awful, so bleak—if they could possibly make it a little bit better, why wouldn’t they return and do so? But for once, he held his tongue, and let Alex continue. “Raven knows she’d be needed here, and I…” he trailed off, but in his voice Charles heard the ache of fear.

“Alex?”

“I wanted to be guaranteed more time with my brother,” Alex muttered, and Charles remembered how while he’d been at Erik’s side, Alex had been at Scott’s. 

“You _will_ ,” he said fiercely. He wondered what Alex had learned about his own future that had frightened him so. “Alex, this is our second chance. Whatever happened in this past, whatever you found out about yourself—it doesn’t have to be our future. We’ve been given a gift. We can’t—we _can’t_ waste it.”

“That’s what the Professor told us,” Alex said, and Charles blinked, still not used to thinking of himself and Xavier as one and the same, although for a brief moment in Erik’s mind they _had_ been. “Raven took it pretty hard, though. The Prof was telling her as we came back over here some of the things she has to go back to do. You might want to. Uh.” He scrubbed a hand over the back of his head and made a face. “ _Talk_ to her when we get back, or whatever.”

“I will,” Charles promised, and grasped the hand Alex had left on the back of his wheelchair. Alex smiled at him, tired but resolved, and Charles remembered, blurrily, through the haze of drugs he’d been on at the time, Alex’s expression of mingled shock, horror, and interest when he’d picked up the phone call from his parents’ house and learned he was going to be an older brother. 

Old Hank barged in then, carrying a thick sheaf of papers that he handed to Xavier. “Sorry,” he said, “had to find a printer that could handle the sheer volume of material we had to compress into two-dimensional images—”

“It’s all right, Hank,” Xavier said fondly. “Logan, Jean, go help Forge with the machine, please. I’d like to speak to our guests alone for a moment.”

Logan and Hank went—Logan making a snide comment about doing the heavy lifting, Hank scowling at him all the way, but with a blue paw on Logan’s shoulder—but Jean lingered. She smiled beatifically at Xavier when he shot her a sharp look. “You can’t get rid of me,” she said. “They’re mine now.”

He seemed to accept this. He thumbed through the pages that Hank had given him, but without really looking at them. “Charles,” he said, and beckoned him forward. Charles moved toward him, curious. “These are the plans we promised you. The makeup and specifications of the Sentinels that Hank and Forge were able to dissect after Erik kindly disabled them all. If they appear in your time— _when_ they appear in your time—you will be ready.”

Charles took the heft of paper cautiously. “I—thank you, but—why give it to me? Why not Raven, or Erik?”

 _To make it your responsibility as well,_ Xavier told him, and Charles nodded sharply. He thought he understood, after having been in Xavier’s mind, the shape and outline of his regrets, and this was one of them—it was what Raven had accused him of, hiding himself away in his school and refusing to fight on behalf of the mutants that needed someone to fight for them. There had been a time when he couldn’t imagine what he could do for Erik and Raven, confined as he was to a wheelchair, but he knew, from the brief press of Xavier’s mind against his, that he had grown up to be a warrior in his own way. A man who survived the time of Sentinels when so few others had. 

Xavier pulled back, physically and mentally. “I suppose,” he said musingly, “it’s time to say good-bye.”

Jean hugged them all. “Take care of him,” Alex whispered huskily into her ear, and she nodded fiercely. Xavier clasped Raven’s hand, and she smiled at him tremulously, a vulnerability to it that she had not shown to Charles in a long, long time. Charles reached out hesitantly with his powers and found Xavier receptive, waiting—a mental press against each other that was less formal than a handshake, less intimate than a hug. The brush of two minds that were still wary of each other—Charles not entirely sure he approved of the man he'd become but absolutely sure that he disapproved of some of the choices he'd made, Xavier disapproving of just about the entirety of Charles's whole being just days ago. 

Then Xavier turned to Erik, and Charles, still half-inside Xavier's mind, could feel his world still.

Wordlessly, Xavier held out his hand, and Erik took it, an almost shy smile on his face. Charles felt the inexplicable and rather irritating urge to turn away and give them some privacy, given that it was technically _his_ moment with Erik. Xavier drew him close, gently, sweetly, and ran a finger down Erik's cheekbone. Erik's eyes fluttered shut.

"Thank you," Erik said softly. "For the nightmares."

Xavier smiled, a slow, creeping thing, like the sun coming up after a polar night, a solid month of darkness. "I should be thanking _you_ , my love. For one last game."

Erik bit his lip. He didn't glance at Charles, but Charles could feel the faintest brush of Erik's mind against his—asking for permission—before he leaned down and kissed Xavier.

Xavier gasped into his mouth—Charles winced at the sudden tumult it seemed he couldn't help projecting to a listening telepath—and gripped Erik's face with his gnarled, scarred fingers. When they broke apart, Xavier's fingers were shaking where they were pressed against Erik's jaw, his cheekbone. His eyes were wet. Charles looked away, but he still heard, like his own breath, Xavier whisper, "And now I find I must thank you for one last kiss. One last moment with the man I love."

"Charles," Erik said, unbearably tender. Charles shuddered, though he knew it wasn't _him_ Erik was addressing, not really—or not yet, at least.

"It should have always been the two of us, my love. Teaching children how to fly," Xavier said, and pressed his forehead against Erik's, a perfect tableau, for just a moment, of love enduring.

— ⓧ —

Charles watched them file into the time machine, Jean radiating strength at his side. His younger self was the last to go, leveraging a long, assessing look at Charles before he wheeled himself into the chamber. Charles felt an unaccountable fondness toward him; when Jean had brought him back, he’d been prepared for the low but persistent self-loathing that had dogged him since he’d uncovered the truth of Erik’s decades in captivity to overwhelm him when he looked at his younger self, and it had, for a while, as Young Charles worked off the high of Hank’s serum and his own righteous anger at Erik. But now, back in a wheelchair, his hand in Erik’s, the feeling that washed over Charles when he observed his younger self was something closer to the tenderness he felt when he thought of his students, the ache he felt for someone very young and very lost and just learning to find their way in the world, someone whose potential he could see glimmering at the edges of their mind, if they would only embrace it.

But if he wanted to shelter and guide Young Charles, it was nothing compared to what he felt for this raw, angry, wounded version of the man who would become his husband. When he’d slipped into his mind for the first time after they’d just arrived from the past, he’d almost wept to find the wounds he’d grown used to in his own Erik’s mind still fresh and bleeding. He’d bandaged them up and pressed mental kisses to each snaking vein of psychic pain, but he’d known even then that there was only so much he could do, that it was up to Young Charles to get his head out of the sand long enough to do the rest. It had hurt, putting the welfare of someone he loved in the hands of his younger self when he didn’t trust him, though he cared for him. And yet he’d risen to the occasion, eventually.

Still, as he watched them go, he couldn’t help but reach out to Young Charles’s mind, one last time, the faintest brush of _Take care of him_ lingering between them.

Young Charles met his eyes. _I will_ , he thought back, and Charles could feel the resolve in him, and he thought that it might be peace.

“Opening the temporal channels,” Forge reported.

“Delta-particle reduction working,” Hank said.

“Big heavy lever lifted,” Logan grunted.

Jean’s hand tightened on his shoulder. Light swallowed them.

And in the instant before they went, Charles remembered—

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	24. 1962: At First Sight

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1962.

He felt it first as a surge of rage and fear so powerful that it spiked straight through his heart and into his mind. Later, he would think that Erik being a mutant had amplified his distress to Charles’s telepathic abilities, like a tuning fork finding the correct frequency, but at the time all he remembered, all he could process, was emotion so pure and vicious it felt as though someone had cut out his bleeding heart and presented it to him. It was a feeling utterly unlike Shaw’s cool distraction or the other telepath’s walls of glittering diamond, as distinct from the muted emotions and interest of Shaw’s crew as a pearl was from chaff. It was _humanity_ , pure humanity, the richest and rawest form of emotion, and Charles fell in love the moment he felt it pressed against his mind, blooming, yawning, taking up all the air in the world like whoever’s mind it belonged to had no space in him for anything other than what he was feeling. “No, no, no,” he realized he was babbling, as Moira and Raven tried to lead him away. He pressed his fingers to his forehead, trying to track that _feeling_ , trying to entrap that mind in his, but it pulled him along in its riptide instead, like a submarine and a magnet. He’d never felt a _will_ like this, one that gave new meaning to the word _indomitable._

If will was enough, that submarine would have surfaced already. This was a mind that could bend steel to its intentions, but this was too big, too much; Charles could feel the strain at the edges of that beautiful, intense mind. “Let go!” he shouted, though he knew the man in the water wouldn’t be able to hear him. “You have to let it go!” He mirrored the words with his mental voice, but they dissipated in the water—or perhaps the rage, barely banked in the man’s chest, was drowning out Charles’s telepathic voice—he had to get closer, he had to make contact—he could already see it, the course this night would take.

The man in the water, willing to die rather than let his quarry get away, at this point so enraged and frenzied that he would rather die fighting than actually kill Shaw, going down, plunging farther and farther down, until he couldn’t break the surface anymore, following the path of the submarine as it went down farther than human bodies could withstand. The breath leaving his lungs, the water flooding in; his lungs spasming, resisting, but helpless to open, salt on his tongue, choking, gasping—and finally the dying flickers of his mind as he fell into unconsciousness and then death—his body still being dragged in the wake of the submarine, his _remarkable_ mutation not ceasing even when he had ceased to be—and no. Untenable, unfathomable.

Telepathy was a nightmare sometimes—every human mind was sparklingly unique, and yet, like a snowflake, the moment you pulled back, utterly indistinguishable from the next. But this man. Erik. Erik Lehnsherr. He wasn’t a snowflake, he was—a mote of sunlight, as dazzling and pure as _sunlight_ spilling into the hand, and the thought of the world without that light, that _life,_ was too much to be borne. He plunged into the water.

Kicking, gasping, aware of the time ticking down—Erik was already underwater—he swam to the center of the ripples shuddering outward, caught in the magnetic grasp of an extraordinary man, grateful for three years on Oxford’s swim team, grateful for the strength in his legs and arms and the determination that had surged through him, giving him strength where the telepath woman had weakened him. He caught his arms around Erik and yanked him backwards, up, to air, to light, to life. _You deserve the surface_ , he thought, _you deserve to walk in the sun_ , but that’s not what he projected with his telepathic voice: _You can’t. You’ll drown. You have to let it go._

Erik lashed back with telepathic furor so vicious that Charles almost let him go—it seemed he’d been at the mercy of the telepath woman, too, and was primed for a fight—a wordless torrent of rage more consuming than the ocean currently freezing them both. He twisted in Charles’s arms. _I know what this means to you,_ Charles cried out, _but you’re going to die._ And he threw everything back at Erik, not sure how much of it was getting through—Erik’s rage, as pure as a sharpened knife, as irrevocable as thrown dice, lapping over a deep well of grief that had never fully healed—and Charles’s understanding, the moment he saw Erik for what he truly was, and the _unacceptable_ idea of the world without that mind, that extraordinary soul. _Please,_ he begged. _Erik, calm your mind._ His heartbeat like a metronome: Please, please, please.

They broke the surface. “Get off me!” Erik shouted, wriggling in his arms. Even through the cold, Charles could feel his heat, and he was dizzy, he’d never felt like this before around someone he was attracted to, he couldn’t even get a good glimpse of Erik’s face and yet he was halfway in love. “Get _off_ me!”

“Calm down! Just breathe!” Charles yelled back. “We’re here!” he shouted up to the ship.

“Who are you?!” Erik snarled, as furious as a cornered and wounded animal, and Charles ached, wished Erik was the second telepath he’d discovered that day, that he could know Charles as well as Charles knew him, as intimately, could love Charles already instead of doing it the slow way, the human way.

“My name’s Charles Xavier,” he panted.

“You were in my head. How did you do that?”

Charles affected a dashing, rakish smile—as much as he could while sopping wet and shivering with cold. “You have your tricks, I have mine, I’m like you, just _calm your mind,_ ” he pleaded, feeling the churn and vicious rage of Erik’s thoughts next to his own. Erik’s mind was so brilliant, so fierce, that the intensity of his emotions burned like a sun, radiated next to him with such power that it was impossible to look away, though it hurt, though it seared his skin. And his words got through to him—at last, the events of the night were settling in Erik’s heart, and slowly something like hope was dawning in his heart, and it was _beautiful_ , beautiful to see.

“I thought I was alone,” Erik gasped.

“You’re not alone. Erik, you’re not alone,” Charles said, but what he meant was, _And neither am I. Not anymore._

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	25. 1968: Back to the Past Again

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

1968.

The first thing Charles heard was Hank swearing. He opened his eyes and the stars wheeled overhead. It was nighttime and—he glanced around at the empty, dusty lot, at the dumpy old van—just minutes, it seemed, after they’d vanished from the timeline. And wasn’t that a trick?

Hank flitted around them nervously. “Are you all right? Charles—your chair? What happened to the serum? How long was it for you?”

“About a week,” Charles says. “Why, how long was it for you?”

“Less than a minute,” Hank said, and he looked as though he was going to implode from sheer scientific curiosity. “What was it like? What was the technological level of 2023? Did you have a chance to discuss any of the genetic or materials-based advances with our future selves? Do you have a sense of whether or not technology continued to advance exponentially or did it level out to a more linear curve when society was destroyed?”

Gone was the nervy panic that had colored his face when they’d left him behind; instead he now looked envious, like in the minute they’d been gone he’d realized that he’d turned down a trip to the _future_ and was sorely kicking himself. Charles suspected that the fact that everyone who was meant to be in this time had returned whole had a great deal to do with his sudden enthusiasm.

He glanced down at the sheaf of papers still in his lap and sounded out slowly, “I’ll tell you all about it later. But I have something I think you’ll like.” But he didn’t hand them over to Hank just yet. He remembered what Xavier had said: that this was his responsibility now, so that he couldn’t turn away from the more unsavory aspects of saving mutantkind as he had before. He held on tightly and with his free hand, grasped for where Erik had laid his own hand on the handle of his wheelchair.

“Charles, this is incredible. You _went to the future_ —” Hank fell silent abruptly, his eyes on where Charles and Erik were touching. Charles gave him his most charming _tell you later_ smile. Hank raised his eyebrows and Charles shrugged. An entire conversation without words passed between them. He would have to explain it all to Hank later, of course, the misunderstanding and the guilt and his own culpability. That Erik would be returning, and the Brotherhood as well—

The Brotherhood. He held up a finger to gesture to Hank to wait and turned to Raven. “Can I speak to you?” he said hesitantly. She nodded, the gregarious girl he’d known turned to stony silences and hard pauses. He patted Erik’s hand, who released him hesitantly, and wheeled to the lee side of the van, so they could have a little privacy.

“I’ve…” he paused, not quite sure how to continue. He knew this was moving too fast, that it would take more than a week of quiet talks in between waiting for Erik to wake up to fully fix what they had broken, but he _wanted_ , and for once everything he wanted was just in reach, and he couldn’t help but stretch for it. “I’ve asked Erik to come back to the mansion with me, and he’s said yes. And… I would like you there as well.”

“Are you going to restart the school?” she asked shrewdly.

“I… don’t know.” It was what Xavier had done, eventually. And he thought that with Erik by his side, he could face it again, but— “Erik and I will talk about it, I imagine. I can’t do it without him. I won’t do anything without him, not again. So maybe. And maybe not.”

Raven smiled, a thin, small gesture, but he took it for what it was, the same look he’d seen on his teachers’ and professors’ faces when he’d answered a question: recognition of the right answer. “It’s helped,” she said softly. “That the Brotherhood has been independent for these past years. It’s made us stronger. It’s kept attention away from you, even after you closed the school.”

Charles’s fingers clenched into a fist. “So you won’t return.”

“I didn’t say that,” Raven said admonishingly. “I’m just saying… it’s not as easy for everyone else to see the right answer as it is for you. I’ll have to talk to them. To tell them what you’ve learned, what we’ve done here. To see what the best option is, for us and for you. We’re a little bit bigger than we were in 1963, Charles.” She paused. “I think… if you do restart the school… a few of the mutants we’ve recruited, they’re not really the fighting type. They might like to teach.”

Charles swallowed around a lump in his throat. “I would like that.”

Raven glanced over her shoulder. “The same day as we left,” she murmured, her eyes tracking the paths of the stars above. “I should… check in. I should’ve checked in hours ago, actually. They’ll be waiting for my report.”

“We can drop you off—”

She shook her head. “It’ll be better if we part ways here,” she said, brisk and businesslike. “The sooner we scatter, the more difficult it’ll be for anyone to trace us. And, no offense, but I don’t want to lead you back to the Brotherhood. Not until we’ve worked something out.”

 _No offense,_ she said. Charles tried his hardest not to be offended. “I’ll see you later, then,” he said, quiet, retiringly, retreating back into the shell he’d constructed for himself—the one of the Charles Xavier who didn’t have a sister.

“Hey, don’t do that,” she said fondly. “I will, you know. See you later.”

She squeezed his hand, and he found himself smiling at her. He could never resist that look, whether her eyes were blue or yellow. She hesitated, then swooped down and hugged him, and he squeezed back, hard, battling back tears.

“Do you know,” she whispered into his hair, “why I stayed after Cuba, Charles?”

He shook his head. He always thought it had something to do with Erik, but—Raven had never been one to ask obvious questions.

“Because I wanted the future that you and Erik made me see. And I still do.” She released him, delicately brushing at the corner of her eye. “If you build it, we will come.”

Charles thought about that for a long time afterward—after Raven had hugged Erik and disappeared into the night, after Hank had bundled them back up into the van and started the long, tiring drive back to New York, as Alex recounted his adventures and waxed rhapsodic on his baby brother’s older self, as the lights of the city and the flat rolling darkness of the country alike flashed by while Charles leaned his head on the window, his fingers intertwined with Erik’s, his mind intertwined with Erik’s, his future intertwined with Erik’s. Beside him, Erik’s mind ticked along, still battered and wound-down from the torment he’d endured, but putting itself together with the help of the mental scaffolding Charles and Xavier had erected. For the first time in a long time, he breathed in the dusty air of the plains and the sweet scent of summer pollen and felt the future unrolling before him. If you build it, we will come. We will come.

— ⓧ —

When they arrived back in Westchester, it was long past midnight according to the clock and just approaching evening according to their bodies’ internal rhythms, and Erik was flagging. He’d only been up and about for around a day, 2023-time, and after the way he’d exhausted himself reaching across the globe for any trace of Sentinel technology, he still slept often and deeply; consciousness itself was enough to work him into a haze of tiredness. Charles wheeled into the house, ready to show Erik to his bedroom, when he hit the stairs and immediately ran into two obstacles: first, that the lift hadn’t worked in half a year, not that he’d ever bothered to get it replaced when he was on Hank’s serum, and second, that his room looked vaguely like he’d had a drug-fueled orgy in it.

Hank noticed his consternation and immediately made to go for his lab. “Oh—I should’ve thought and brought you an extra dose—I can—”

 _“No,”_ Charles blurted out, conscious of Erik’s gaze on the back of his head. His head throbbed as if in remembrance of how difficult it had been to keep the world out when Erik had been gone—but he wasn’t gone now, he was wrapped around Charles’s mind like the best kind of insulation, and he _remembered_ the veiled devastation in Erik’s eyes when he’d told him the truth about how much the outside had chafed at him in his absence.

He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, a nervous tic that he knew was broadcasting to everyone that he wasn’t as sure about his decision as he was pretending to be—surely just for one night, just until they got the lift fixed, it couldn’t hurt—but he knew if he made a move toward convenience now, he wouldn’t be able to let it go, not until something else happened, and the thought of another moment without Erik’s mind tangled in his was unacceptable anyway. His arm itched, but he ignored it. Time enough for cravings and withdrawal and regrets later—and he knew they would come, the moment Erik left on a mission again, or even went down to the store for groceries, he knew they would come as bitter and biting as winter—but that was part of the future he’d promised Erik, and so for now he set it aside.

“I’ll take my old bedroom downstairs,” he said. The one he’d shared with Erik, he meant. The one that had never really felt right without him, for all that Charles had continued to use it for two months after Erik had been taken. “Come on,” he said to Erik, though of course he knew the way. Hank opened his mouth, but Charles shot him a dark look, and he desisted, even though he was probably right, that it was too soon for them to be sharing a bed again in spite of how they’d slept while Erik recovered in the future. Charles rubbed fingers over Erik’s knuckles where his hands were wrapped around the handles of his chair. “Come on,” he said more softly, and Erik pushed him on.

Their old room was coated in a thick layer of dust and no one had changed the sheets since 1964, but that was all right, that was another thing they could work on fixing together tomorrow. Erik helped him into bed the way they used to and then crawled under the sheets immediately, still wearing the futuristic leather jumpsuit that was all he’d had in the way of clothing besides his prison uniform for the past week.

Charles felt something close to wide-awake himself and settled himself against the headboard, but as Erik buried his face in Charles’s hip, the faintest tickle of his breath brushing against the point of bared skin where his pajama shirt rode up, and drifted off to sleep, Charles felt his own breathing slow, approaching something like meditation. His heart was in his arms again and drooling onto the body parts he was using for a pillow. Charles combed his fingers through Erik’s hair, still prison-short, but growing out now into the short curls he’d had when he’d vanished from his life. The book he’d been reading when Erik had left on that fateful mission was still on the bedside table, but he didn’t reach for it yet.

“We’ll figure it out,” he said quietly.

“A week in a dystopian hellscape has truly rekindled your optimism, hm?” Erik murmured.

Charles looked down. Erik’s eyes were still closed, but a tiny smile with only a trace of bitterness was playing around his lips. “I thought you were asleep,” he said admonishingly.

“Shh. I am,” Erik said, and faked a delicate snore to demonstrate.

Charles grinned and wrapped a burgeoning curl around his finger. Erik’s mind continued to buzz lowly, that state of near-sleep that had tricked Charles into thinking that he was speaking to himself, but a little spark of pleasure ran through it. “ _You,”_ Charles said, “have rekindled my optimism. I must cope with your terrible cynicism somehow.”

Erik opened his eyes. They were very green tonight. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” he said quietly.

“I know you’ve a reason to distrust any promises I might make,” Charles said slowly, a note of seriousness sinking into his voice. “But. I won’t lie to you or myself, Erik. Not anymore. So when I tell you that we’ll figure it out… I mean it. Because I can’t see any way forward where we don’t.”

Erik sighed and closed his eyes again rather than respond. Slowly, the buzz of faint consciousness faded into true sleep, and Charles returned to sliding his fingers through Erik’s hair. “We’ll work it out,” he said again, now a conscious vow to the both of them instead of a whispered hope to himself. “I won’t let you go again. And I’ll keep you safe,” and he committed each promise to heart, like it was carved on the inside of his ribs, like it was written on the pillars of his mind: the only things that mattered, not to Charles Xavier, mutant educator and role model, but to Charles, who belonged wholly and entirely to Erik.

— ⓧ —

His resolve was put to the test not two weeks later.

He felt them as they were coming up from the town. It was a rare overcast day at the height of summer, and a bad day; the injection marks on his arm had itched since he’d woken up, he’d snapped at Hank for asking whether he wanted another dose, and Erik had gone quiet and solitary, a turn during which everything was too loud, too raw for someone who had either been in solitary confinement or excruciating pain for the last five years, and so reluctantly Charles had let go him ramble the grounds out of his sight, confining himself to the faintest tether between their minds. With the protection offered by Erik’s mind stretched thin, the world was rubbing harshly at the edges of his telepathy again, and he had remembered why he’d wanted the serum in the first place, which hadn’t improved his mood any. When he felt strange minds moving up the winding lane, then, his first thought hadn’t been polite curiosity but a pretty long string of swearwords that might have impressed even Alex.

“Charles,” Hank murmured as they came up the drive, “I ran their license plate. CIA.”

“Oh, good,” Charles said, and bared his teeth.

A nondescript sedan rolled into the driveway and four nondescript men stepped into the atrium and then into his study where Hank had set out tea for them. They did their best not to look unnerved at this clear sign that they’d been expected. Charles wheeled to the low tea table, forcing them to sit on the squashy leather sofas instead of looming over him at his desk, and smiled beatifically at them. A low simmering anger had ignited in the pit of his stomach; he knew who they were here for.

“Gentlemen,” he said in his sweetest tones. The edges of his mind tracked Erik, who was sitting by the pond in the back garden, fingers trailing in the water as fish came up to nibble at the tips. “What can I help you with?”

“Mr. Xavier,” the lead agent said. Dodds, Charles skimmed his name from the top of his mind.

Charles smiled and showed his teeth. _“Dr._ Xavier.”

“Dr. Xavier,” Dodds corrected himself. “Listen, we’ll cut right to the chase—”

“This is good,” one of the other men said, a note of surprise in his voice, over the cup of tea. Charles didn’t bother with his name. He’d be gone soon enough.

“Why, thank you,” Charles said warmly.

Dodds glared at the man who’d spoken. “As I was saying, we’ll skip the pleasantries—we’re here about—”

The man who’d complimented his tea stood, straightening his suit jacket. “We should go,” he said, and then to Charles, courteously, “we’ve impinged on enough of your time.”

“Boone, _sit down,_ ” Dodds snarled, and then, to Charles, spat out, “Lehnsherr. We’re here about Lehnsherr.”

Charles raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen Erik in five years.”

“Now, we know that’s not true,” Dodds said triumphantly. He reached into his jacket and threw down a set of stills from security footage; Charles and Hank and Jean, dressed in their Pentagon-infiltration clothes, and in the corner, Erik’s face in profile, just visible at the edges of what the camera had captured. “We don’t know who the kids are, or the woman, but you’re a known CIA asset, Xavier.”

“ _Dr._ Xavier.”

“Whatever,” Dodds snapped. “You can’t cover this one up like you did with MacTaggert.”

Mildly, Charles reached forward and paged through them, then set them neatly back down on the table. “I don’t know what you want from me,” he said. “I hardly see the relevance.”

Dodds opened his mouth. This time, the man on his right was the one to speak. “He’s right,” he said abruptly. “We’re wasting time here. Let’s go.”

Dodds stiffened and looked slowly at Charles, who smiled pleasantly and said nothing.

Dodds grabbed for his gun. Charles froze him in place.

“You’re messing with their minds,” Dodds said, a stiff calm in his voice belied by the panic flaring in his eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Agent Dodds,” he said, and watched the man pale as he realized Charles had been in his head as well to take his name from him. “I haven’t seen Erik Lehnsherr in five years. I didn’t break him out of the Pentagon, and he’s certainly not staying here now, recuperating from what you and your people did to him.” Dodds’s eyes bulged and he opened his mouth to speak; sure that it wasn’t anything that he would want to hear, Charles froze that too. “Look,” he said, “your colleagues agree with me,” and Dodds glanced around and went even whiter to see that the others were nodding, alert and polite and totally disinterested.

“Now,” Charles said, “I could have left you with the same impression that absolutely nothing untoward went on here and the security footage is unimportant, but I’ve read your mind, Agent Dodds. I know you’re in charge of the manhunt for Erik. I know that you know that he was innocent. I know that you know what’s been done to him. And so I want some part of you to remember, when you’ve gone back to Langley, when you tell them that Erik Lehnsherr is nowhere near this part of the country, when you continue to flub the investigation until it gets shelved and you, likely, get demoted, when you warn anyone with undue interest away from whatever this place becomes in the future—I want part of you to remember this, and be afraid. I want you to remember that _you do not get to touch him again.”_ He sipped at his tea. Over-steeped, bless Hank. “Are we done here?”

“Yes,” Dodds said, bored and impatient to get to his next lead. “Sorry for wasting your time, Dr. Xavier.”

“Not at all,” Charles said genially, and let them out.

When their minds had been subsumed by the press of minds in town, Charles took a deep breath. He wanted to go and find Erik, to set his eyes on him and reassure himself that no, they hadn’t taken him, that Erik was safe and his and _protected_ above all else, but before he could, he felt the press of Erik’s mind against his and, smiling, let him in.

 _You all right?_ Erik thought at him, obviously sensing the tension running like veins through Charles’s consciousness.

Charles closed his eyes and stepped into Erik’s mind. The world rippled with lines of magnetic current through Erik’s eyes, and he felt a warm fondness surge through him as he recognized Charles’s presence in his mind. He’d taken his shoes off now and was dangling his feet in the water; the fish curiously swirled around his toes, judging whether it was safe to take a nibble. He tilted his face back and the sun washed over him, bathing him in deliciously warm, clean light. Around him, the world was blooming with summer; the grass sharply, meanly green, the sky fathomless blue, as deep and pure as, Erik thought, Charles’s eyes. Charles felt himself flush. He reached out a mental hand, and Erik took it, and together they let the sun lap at them from four hundred feet away from each other, and Charles thought: _This is worth it. This is worth anything._

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —


	26. 2023: A Future

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

2023.

As it had been for the last twenty years, Jean Grey’s first class of the day was always telepathic shielding, because no one deserved to have geometry inflicted upon them at eight in the morning. On this day in October, however, she paused in the middle of her lecture when Ororo sent her a fresh burst of bubbling thought-laughter and projected, _You need to see this._

“One second,” she told her students. Laura was doodling with one of her claws in the wooden desk. She thought rather that she ought to have yelled about that, but Ororo was prodding at her impatiently, and she ducked out into the hallway and headed to the students’ wing.

When she got there, she saw immediately why Ororo had fetched her. Charles was blinking wetly at little Tommy Hargreaves, who’d set up a bucket of water over his door for his roommate, whom Jean suspected he had a crush the size of Jupiter on. “Professor,” she said, trying to hold back her giggles, “how did you fall for that? You’re _telepathic.”_

Disgruntled, Charles shot her the memory of Tommy’s flash of wordless panic when he’d realized it was him at the door and not Julio Richter, which, in fairness, would’ve sent her into the room at once as well. Panic at realizing an adult authority figure was right outside the door never boded well. 

_He looks like a wet cat,_ Ororo thought-giggled at her.

 _One of those bald ones,_ Jean agreed, and Ororo started laughing aloud from where she was perched on the banister above. Charles shot them both a wounded look, but students were already beginning to gather and whisper, so he hustled Tommy back into his room with a severe look and closed the door sharply behind them. Jean memorized the ire on his face to show Scott later.

— ⓧ —

Kate had worked with the X-Men for nearly a decade, but this was her first mission with M-Force, and she would be lying if she said that Mystique’s cool glare didn’t make her nervous. Mystique was nearly as old as the Professors, but she still fought and healed like a woman a fraction of that age; she’d been leading M-Force almost since it was founded out of what had once been called the Brotherhood of Mutants, while Professor Lehnsherr had taken the helm of the X-Men, but though he had long since retired to more peaceful pursuits (relatively; teaching Algebra to about fifty bored teenagers was not a mission for the faint of heart), she had kept going, and going, and going. M-Force without Mystique was almost as unthinkable as the school with the Professors, and facing her down as her subordinate was… there was no other word for it, _intimidating._

Sure, Kate had learned self-defense from her along with all the other X-Men, current and former, but M-Force was held to higher standards than her combat classes, and Mystique refused to take her eyes off her, communicating quite clearly that any screw-up from the new girl would be met with swift and unequivocal punishment. She swallowed nervously and wished Marie were there to hold her hand.

Mystique laid out a map and said, “This is Transigen’s third transgression against mutant rights. First their failed attempt at influencing the rate of mutant births, then the Rice cloning project… this time, we’re going in, and we’re taking them down, start to finish. Rasputina, you’re with me. We’re going to send a message to Dr. Rice, since evidently he didn’t get it the first two times. Havok, take Team Gamma, tear down their laboratories. I don’t want a single shred of latex tubing to be usable afterward. Pryde, you’re going straight to the top. Bypass the security measures and get me information. I want financial records, blackmail files, anything you can get—their whole server if you can swing it. This will be a multi-pronged attack. I don’t just want to go after their infrastructure, I want to tear their whole organization to the ground.” She looked at Kate keenly, assessingly. “Can you handle that?”

Kate took a deep breath and said—

— ⓧ —

“Do you think we can pull Raven away from M-Force long enough to get her to teach that seminar about physical mutations again?” Charles asked.

Erik smacked him playfully away from where he was hovering over the soup pot, very clearly trying to sneak close enough to get a taste. Charles adored being around Erik when he cooked; over the years, the symphony of his mind had mellowed into a quiet harmony of motion when he cooked, the colors of his mind thrumming in perfect synchrony, the entire experience like a orchestral tableau just for Charles. “Perhaps you should ask Glob this year. Raven can be… intimidating to the youngsters.”

“Why? Because she’s a dangerous mutant commando leader?”

 _I meant because of her beauty,_ Erik teased him.

“A dangerous mutant commando leader who walks around naked,” Charles amended, and then smiled, the jealousy long faded, and snuck a taste of the soup when he turned away, just managing to dodge the spatula sweeping down on him.

Long after they’d passed major milestones that seemed to indicate the future was on a different path than the one they’d seen so long ago—2012 had passed without any Sentinel-related incidents, although there had been a close call in 2017 that had engaged both the X-Men _and_ M-Force in a brawl that resulted in seventy-four countries signing an act banning technology that was specifically targeted to the X-gene—Charles could still grow anxious that it hadn’t been enough, that they hadn’t changed the future _enough._ Only this year, during 2023, did he finally seem to settle, although he suspected he wouldn’t be totally convinced of his success until the year turned and he saw the beginning of a future entirely uncolored by their once and future selves. 

In the meantime, he and Erik kept themselves busy, although less so now than in years gone by. They were hardly getting any younger. The early dinners that they’d had to fight to carve out for themselves once a week had grown into two, then four as Jean and Scott and the others took up the burden of homework help after dinner. Now Charles watched Erik cook nearly every night, just for them—Jubilation had long taken over the kitchen for the students. Charles had long ago amended his will to leave Erik in charge of the school, but now he was thinking of successors for both of them, not in the event of his untimely death, but just as a result of the inexorable passage of time.

“Do you ever think about retiring?” Charles asked.

Erik scoffed. He flipped the beef loin he was searing to its other side. “Retiring? And doing what?”

“I don’t know,” Charles said dreamily. “Sitting by a lake somewhere. Resting. Somewhere far away from the school and the screaming and the buckets of water falling on your head.”

Erik smirked. “I heard about that. And we’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

“Going into politics, then. Taking a stand on mutant rights.”

“And step on Emma’s toes? I’d rather die at my desk with a little dignity.”

Charles smiled fondly at his husband of twelve years. Erik could be so _contrary._ They argued for fun (and had perhaps set rather more of an example than they’d wanted in that regard; the school’s debate team was one of the best in the state), but part of the joy of matching wits with Erik was that though he made you _work_ for your victory, once you had it, you had a staunch defender. “I don’t know. Starting a mutant colony. Every now and then you get on one of your separatist kicks, you know—”

“They’re not _kicks_ , they’re a return to ideological purism—”

“It could be a nudist colony,” Charles suggested cheerfully. “We could walk around in the buff. Preach free love for mutants.”

Erik snorted and dished up the beef loin and green beans he’d been prepared. Forks and knives danced into place; it had taken Charles years to teach him how to properly set a table, but it was worth it for this little Disneyesque dance. “Missing the sixties are you, Professor Xavier?”

“Missing my hair, at least.”

“You know I love you just as you are,” Erik said affectionately.

“Ah,” Charles said. “So if a younger me appeared from the past now with a full head of hair, you wouldn’t throw me over immediately?”

“Well… I love you just as you were, as well.”

“You’re terrible,” Charles said, smiling.

They ate together amiably, familiarly. Erik paused a moment before he put down his fork and said, gently, “You’ve been thinking of the past lately.”

“The past and the future,” Charles admitted. “It’s 2023. Haven’t you?”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” Erik said. His eyes still looked the same. After all these years, they were lined with age and they tended to shade more to green than blue, but they still glinted with the same ferocity, the same intensity, that had drawn Charles to him so long ago. “Charles… so many times in my youth I was certain I wouldn’t even have a future. All those lost years under the Pentagon… the idea of having a future at all was devastating. More of the same, more pain, more missing you. When I got out, I vowed to never think of the future again. To just enjoy you. To just enjoy the life that we built, at every step that we built it.”

Charles swallowed. “You really never think of them? Our other selves?”

“I never met my other self,” Erik said gently. After all this time, Erik’s premature death still rubbed sorely at Charles, even though it had never happened. “It’s different for you. Harder. Always comparing every action to what you might have done, who you might have been… wondering if you would’ve been proud of yourself.”

Trust Erik to cut right to the root of the issue. “I feel like you knew him better than I did,” Charles said hesitantly. “Do you think so? That he’d be proud of me?”

Erik smiled. A crinkling around the eyes, a hand over his at the dinner table. “I don’t know. But _I’m_ proud of you.”

Charles closed his eyes. _I love you,_ he thought, or maybe projected; after so long living out of each other’s pockets, it was more or less the same thing. He didn’t need to wait for Erik to say it back. Finally, finally, after fifty-five years of peace shared, of love confessed, he already knew—just as he knew that love was not a word you said, but a future you built together, and they twined their futures together so very long ago.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

**Author's Note:**

> Although this fic is over now, a small window into the AU of this fic where Old Erik survived to greet the time-travelers will be posted on 5 January. 
> 
> Thanks to the inimitable [librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/pseuds/librata) for the beta. And thanks for the incredible support y'all have given me this year. To all the readers, the commenters, the bookmarkers, the kudosers, I wish for you the future you need.
> 
> X-Men movie continuity is great in how terrible it is because then you can say shit like "Magneto from the original timeline in DoFP and Magneto in X-Men/X2/X3 are _not_ from the same continuity even though they're played by the same actor" and no one can argue with you.
> 
> Tumble me at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com).
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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